Allocation band
An allocation band groups a day's planned hours into a named load level, such as under-loaded, partly loaded, full or over. Bands exist because a grid of raw hour figures cannot be scanned. A band collapses a number into a category a person reads at a glance.
On a grid of thirty people across a month, no reader processes nine hundred numbers. They look for shape: where the crowding is, where the gaps are.
Bands make that shape visible. The grid stops being a table to interrogate and becomes a picture to scan, which is the difference between a planning view somebody uses weekly and one they open twice.
The boundaries are a real design decision. Too few bands and everything looks the same. Too many and the scanning advantage disappears.
The trade is precision. A band tells you a day is full without telling you whether it is seven hours or eight, and a planner acting on the band alone can misjudge a tight week. Bands are for finding where to look. The underlying hours are for deciding what to do.
Bands also carry a hidden assumption: that a full day means the same thing for everyone. A part-time person's full day is not a full-timer's, and a band scale built on one standard day will mark them over-loaded on a week that is perfectly normal for them.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster bands each day as Under, Partial, Full or Over against the expected working day, eight hours by default, with leave and holidays already taken out.
Questions people ask
Why use bands instead of hours?
Scanning speed. A month-wide grid of raw numbers hides its own pattern. Bands surface the crowded and the empty stretches without anybody reading each cell.
Do bands account for leave?
In PeopleMuster they do. Leave and holidays are marked separately and taken out first, so a day off does not read as an under-loaded working day.
Can band boundaries be changed?
The four labels are Under, Partial, Full and Over. They follow the expected working day rather than sitting at fixed hour counts, so a team on a shorter standard day gets boundaries that move with it.