Capacity planning
Capacity planning is the exercise of matching committed work against the hours a team genuinely has, across a future period. Its output is an answer to one question: can what has been promised be delivered by the people who exist, in the time remaining.
The exercise is arithmetic, and it stays honest only if the inputs are. Commitments on one side. Available hours on the other, with absence already removed.
Most capacity plans fail on the second input. Built on contracted hours, they show comfortable headroom that disappears the moment leave is counted. The plan was wrong on the day it was written.
The other common failure is granularity. A monthly total hides a week where three people are away at once and the deadline lands. Plan at the level the trouble happens on, which is usually the week or the day.
Timing matters as much as method. A plan produced after commitments are signed is a report. The value is in doing it before, when the answer can still change what gets promised, and when saying that a date does not fit costs a conversation rather than a delivery.
The output is often a no, and that is the point. A capacity plan that has never once changed a commitment is not being used. It is being produced, filed, and quietly worked around by whoever needed the answer to be yes.
Where this shows up in PeopleMuster
PeopleMuster plans capacity on a person-by-day grid across the month, with leave and holidays already subtracted, so a crowded week is visible before it arrives.
Questions people ask
How far ahead should capacity be planned?
Far enough to change a decision, which usually means one to three months. Detail beyond that is fiction: neither the work nor the absences are known well enough.
Who should own the capacity plan?
Somebody who can see both sides, the pipeline and the people. Split the ownership and the plan reliably assumes the optimistic version of whichever half it cannot see.
What makes a capacity plan wrong?
Nearly always the denominator. Available hours that ignore leave, holidays or standing internal commitments produce headroom that was never there.