Capacity planning compares the work you expect to accept with the time and capabilities actually available. Deduct support, meetings, leave and other commitments, then examine constrained skills and variability. Make trade-offs explicit before promising more work; nominal paid hours are not the same as dependable delivery capacity.
Calculate usable capacity for the relevant period
Choose a period short enough to reflect real commitments, such as the next four weeks. List each person’s available hours and remove known leave, meetings, support coverage and internal responsibilities. Avoid assuming that a vacant role or unconfirmed contractor will be available. Keep the source of each estimate visible so a colleague can update the plan when circumstances change.
Group availability by the skills the work requires. Forty hours of general delivery time cannot automatically replace ten hours of specialist review. Identify shared dependencies such as a single approver, a limited test environment or customer access windows. Note whether an estimate represents focused task time or elapsed time. A five-hour task waiting three days for an external input occupies the schedule differently from five uninterrupted hours of work.
Compare demand using ranges and commitments
List accepted work, probable near-term work and speculative requests separately. Estimate effort in a consistent unit and record uncertainty. Include expected revisions, coordination and customer support rather than only the visible production step. For repeat services, examine a small sample of actual effort to challenge estimates. Do not turn an average into a promise when unusual cases regularly consume much more time.
Place the work against the constrained resource and agreed dates. If demand exceeds capacity, show the gap explicitly. Options may include sequencing later, narrowing scope, obtaining suitable help or declining work. The decision belongs with the appropriate commercial and delivery owners. Avoid hiding a gap through routine unpaid overtime or assuming every customer will provide inputs immediately. Those assumptions create fragile dates while concealing the cost from the person making the promise.
Make a commitment rule and review it
Agree who can accept additional work and what evidence they need. A useful rule might require a delivery owner to confirm the relevant skill window before sales offers a date. Keep a visible queue for requests awaiting that check. Explain when a date is provisional and what must be confirmed. This protects customer expectations while allowing genuine urgency to be discussed openly.
Review the plan at a regular interval and when a material dependency changes. Compare planned effort, actual effort and waiting reasons without using the exercise to rank people by apparent busyness. Look for recurring underestimation or work repeatedly omitted from the plan. Keep a dated decision log so changed priorities remain explainable to teams and customers.
Preserve some flexibility for the uncertainty your service actually faces. The appropriate allowance depends on variability and consequences, so choose it from evidence rather than copying a universal percentage. If urgent work arrives, identify what moves and who authorises the trade-off. An emergency label should not make an existing promise disappear from the schedule without a conversation.
Fictional worked example
A fictional scenario to explain the method, not a customer result or a market benchmark.
A fictional three-person service team, Vale Works, begins with 120 nominal hours in a week. It records 38 hours for support, meetings and planned leave, leaving 82 hours for scheduled delivery. Accepted client work is estimated at 110 hours. The plan therefore shows a 28-hour gap before allowing for unexpected work; the team does not describe the week as merely busy.
Vale Works identifies one specialist review as the narrowest resource. It moves a flexible internal task, discusses a later start with one customer and checks the availability of qualified external help before making another promise. The revised dates remain estimates with stated dependencies. These invented figures demonstrate subtraction and decision ownership, not a recommendation that every team should achieve the same utilisation or use the same reserve.
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A practical next-step checklist.
- Deduct known non-delivery time from nominal hours.
- Separate constrained skills from general availability.
- Compare accepted and uncertain demand explicitly.
- Name the authority for dates and priority trade-offs.
Common questions.
Should we plan everyone at full availability?
Full loading leaves no room for the variation you already observe. Choose a practical allowance using service evidence and review its adequacy.
Can extra people immediately remove a capacity gap?
Only if they have the required capability, access and support. Include onboarding and review effort before assuming additional hours are interchangeable.
Further reading & source context.
These primary references provide background. They are not evidence for the fictional example above and do not endorse AccelerateLink.
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