Most small teams do not do capacity planning. They do optimism planning. They look at the work coming in, assume everyone will be at full productivity, forget about meetings and admin and the unexpected thing that always happens, and say yes. Then they wonder why everything is late.
Start by measuring what you actually have ¶
Before you can plan capacity, you need to know how many hours of productive work your team actually produces in a week. Not contracted hours. Actual hours available for project work after meetings, admin, internal communication, and the general friction of working in an organisation. For most knowledge workers, this is somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of contracted hours. Measure it for your team specifically. The number is usually lower than people expect.
Map what you have already committed ¶
List every ongoing commitment: recurring meetings, standing projects, maintenance work, client retainers, internal initiatives. Assign hours per week to each. Add them up. The gap between that number and your available capacity is what you actually have to allocate to new work. In most teams, this gap is smaller than assumed and sometimes it is negative, which explains a lot.
Build in a buffer and actually protect it ¶
Leave 15 to 20 percent of capacity unallocated. Not as a vague intention but as a real constraint. When something unexpected comes in, and it will, you have somewhere to put it without breaking everything else. Teams that run at 100 percent allocation have no resilience. One unexpected thing and the whole plan falls apart.
Review it every two weeks, not every quarter ¶
Capacity changes. People get sick. Projects run long. New work comes in. A capacity plan that is only reviewed quarterly is out of date within a month. A quick fortnightly check, fifteen minutes, is enough to catch drift before it becomes a crisis. It does not need to be a meeting. It can be a shared document that one person updates and everyone can see.
Capacity planning is not complicated. It is just honest accounting of time. If your team keeps missing deadlines or burning out, the problem is almost always a capacity problem in disguise. If you want to look at it properly, the operations audit is a good starting point. See what we deliver.