From headcount to the architect's brief — on one set of numbers.
Size the need, test it against every building on the shortlist, stack your teams on the floors, then lock the chosen solution and govern every change after it. Six tools that hand the same demand along, so the business case, the lease and the drawings agree.
Part of Workplacer Improve — run inside a project, with its stages, gates and decisions on record.
Six questions, answered in order — each one checking the last.
Every tool reads what the one before it decided, so nothing is sized twice and nobody plans from a different number.
More about Space Estimate ↓
More about Space Program ↓
More about Test Fit ↓
More about Stack Plan ↓
More about Fit-out Brief ↓
More about Layout Review ↓
What each step takes in, does and hands on
Every tool works inside a project and reads what the earlier ones decided. Here is what you bring, what the tool does with it, and what you get out.
Space Estimate
The first answer, before anyone looks at buildings: how much space this organisation needs, as a range rather than a single number, and how that compares with what you have today.
150 people need 1 000–1 300 sqm; you hold 1 450 today.
You bring
- Today's headcount, and the growth you expect
- How people work — the workplace model and how often they are in
- The space you occupy today, if you want the comparison
What it does
- Gives a Low, Mid and High area, so the uncertainty is visible
- Compares sqm per person with benchmarks for organisations like yours
- Shows today against what is needed — the gap or the surplus
- Looks ahead at the growth outlook
What you get
- A range to search with and brief brokers on
- A first desk count at a sensible sharing ratio
- A shareable estimate with its assumptions spelled out
Space Program
The brief in detail. The Space Program turns people and the way they work into rooms, settings and areas — the number every later tool sizes from.
- Work settings 620
- Support 174
- Circulation 238
You bring
- Headcount — today, or at the Growth Plan horizon
- The dimensioning % — the share of people the office is designed for (from the Dimensioning tool)
- How people spend their time — the Office Activity Profile, by department where it differs
- The workplace model, including assigned desks for part of the organisation
What it does
- People × dimensioning % = office FTE
- Splits each activity over room, screened and open settings, and spreads it over 20+ work settings
- Rounds to whole rooms, drops rooms with too little demand, and adds the minimums an office needs
- Sizes support areas — reception, kitchen, storage — by each one's own rule, then adds circulation
- Counts desk, meeting and other seats
- Groups settings into neighbourhoods, and takes suggestions back from Test Fit and Stack Plan
What you get
- A room-by-room schedule with quantities and sizes
- The area needed, split into work settings, support and circulation
- Seats by kind and desks per person as an outcome, not an input
- An RFP-ready breakdown for landlords and brokers
Test Fit
Does the need fit this building — and which option on the shortlist fits best? Test Fit checks the programme against real floors before you commit to a lease.
You bring
- The need — from the Space Program, the Space Estimate or a quick estimate
- The floorplate — a typed area, a site's recorded floors, or a search proposal
- The planning efficiency — typed, worked out from the plate, or read off a floor plan
What it does
- Gives a verdict on area: fits, tight or does not fit
- Places the programme floor by floor: rooms whole, desks filling the rest, teams kept together
- Flags rooms bigger than any floor and teams too big for one floor
- Works out planning efficiency from depth, shape, core and column grid — AI can read these off the drawing
- Tests every proposal on the shortlist against the same need and ranks them by cost per person
- When it doesn't fit, shows what would — a lower ratio, less circulation — and sends it to the Space Program
What you get
- A verdict with headroom in people and floors needed
- A ranked shortlist on one basis
- The floor-by-floor reasons when a building fails
- A written assessment with design considerations and next steps
Stack Plan
Who sits where in a building you hold or have chosen — and what can go. Departments are sized the Space Program's way and stacked by area onto the floors.
Floor 3 is empty — at the site's lease cost, about 1.9 m SEK a year.
You bring
- The site's floors and their area
- The departments allocated to the site, with headcount
- The Space Program — its dimensioning, activity profiles and planner's edits
- Optionally a Growth Plan, to plan for the future organisation
What it does
- Dimensions each department: people → office FTE → desk, meeting and other seats → area
- Auto-stacks onto the fewest floors, keeps departments whole and pairs together
- Lets you drag, move part of a department, pin it, and hold space back for reception or a café
- Stacks by team, by a higher level of the organisation, or by neighbourhood
- Checks the desk seats on each floor against the workpoints recorded there
- Compares a working version with the baseline: who moves, how many people
What you get
- A floor-by-floor stack with fill and overflow
- Floors that could be released, valued at the site's lease cost
- Seats needed per department, today and at the horizon
- The released rent carried into the business case
Fit-out Brief
Once the space is chosen, the brief is locked: one agreed version of what is being built, handed to the architects, with every change after that on record.
- v1.0Locked 5 Oct by the project leader
- Two phone boothsFloor 1 · +18 000 SEK · 5 daysApproved
- v1.1Current brief
- Baseline
- Approved changes
- Pending
You bring
- The chosen space — it follows Test Fit until you change it
- The Space Program, the Stack Plan and the technical requirements
- The FF&E budget and a Fit-out Budget scenario
- Who may approve changes
What it does
- Shows a checklist of what the brief will draw on, and a preview
- Locks v1.0: programme per floor, stack, requirements, budget — frozen
- Takes change requests with a cost and a time impact
- Approval writes a decision to the Decision Register and moves the brief to v1.1, v1.2 …
- Keeps the budget as baseline, approved and pending
- Watches the technical requirements — anything added or changed after lock becomes a change request in one click
What you get
- An architect brief, shared by link
- A versioned change log with names and dates
- A fit-out budget held against its baseline
Layout Review
Did the drawing deliver what was agreed? Layout Review reads the architect's drawings and checks them against the locked brief — or diagnoses the layout you occupy today.
- P1Boardroom moved to floor 3 — needs a change request
- P2Two quiet rooms short on floor 4
- P3Reception far from the lifts
You bring
- The drawings — uploaded, or picked from the site's floor plans
- Whether it is a proposed design or the current, as-built layout
- Optionally your own room counts, which win over what the AI reads
- Designer notes — phasing, temporary walls, base-build givens
What it does
- AI reads the drawing: room types, counts, zoning, circulation, adjacency
- Scores programme fit, needs fit and spatial quality separately
- Checks a proposed design against the locked brief, floor by floor — anything drawn differently needs a change request
- Checks each must-have technical requirement: met, partial, unmet or cannot assess
- Says “cannot assess” rather than guessing when the drawing can't answer
What you get
- A scored review with its breakdown
- A punch list addressed to the architect, client or engineers
- Per-requirement findings
- Room counts you can take into the Space Inventory in one click
The difference between a plan and a set of spreadsheets
One demand, set once
The headcount, the dimensioning and the way people work are decided in one place. Every later tool reads them — the shortlist, the stack and the brief never quietly disagree.
No re-keyingEach step checks the last
A building that is tight tells the programme what would make it fit; a stack that overflows at the growth horizon suggests sizing for the future organisation. You accept or ignore, in the tool that owns the number.
Feedback, not driftDecided means decided
Once the space is chosen the brief is locked and versioned. Changes are requests with a cost and a time impact, and every approval is a decision with a name and a date on it.
Change controlThe people who carry a space decision
Lease decisions on a defensible need
Know how much space you need before the shortlist, which building fits it, and which floor you could hand back — valued at the lease you pay today.
Sizing grounded in how people work
Activity profiles, dimensioning and seat mix carried from the programme into every floor and team, instead of a ratio typed into a spreadsheet.
One brief, one change log
Hand the architects a locked brief, check their drawings against it, and govern every change with its cost — with the decisions on record for the steering group.
Read the Workplacer product story
What Workplacer is, the value it creates, and how the platform fits together — in brief or in full. Read it online or download the PDFs.
Make the next space decision on numbers that agree.
We will walk you through the chain on your own portfolio — one site, one project, from headcount to brief.