A Practical Guide to Resource Capacity Planning

Headcount is not usable capacity

A team of twenty people does not provide twenty interchangeable units of capacity. Leave, part-time schedules, existing assignments and skill requirements change what can be committed. Begin with the working calendar and calculate capacity for the period in which the work must happen.

Build the planning baseline

Agree the treatment of holidays, internal work and reserved allocations before comparing teams. Keep planned allocation separate from actual time. One tells you what has been committed; the other tells you what happened. Both are useful, but they answer different questions.

• Calendar: working hours, holidays and planned leave.
• Commitments: confirmed, tentative and internal allocations.
• Requirement: skill, proficiency, duration and location.
• Exception: over-allocation, uncovered demand or uncertain release.

Expose the shortfall by skill and week

In an illustrative week, a person has forty working hours and eight hours of leave. After a confirmed twenty-four-hour assignment, eight hours remain before any internal commitments. A second project needing sixteen hours cannot be staffed by calling that person partly available without examining the gap.

Keep the plan current without rebuilding it

Review changes to demand, leave and releases at a regular cadence. Give tentative bookings expiry dates and owners. When a project slips, check both the extended commitment and the work that expected to use the released capacity. That is where a current plan becomes more useful than a static allocation sheet.