Capacity management for projects

Most organisations are not short of ideas. They are short of people to deliver all of them at once — and that usually only becomes clear after something has already been committed to, not before.

Capacity management is about one question: do we have room for this, and when do we know that clearly enough to act on it. That is a different question from who is working when — that is rostering, and this is not it.

The question this is actually trying to answer

Any organisation running more than a handful of projects at once knows the pattern: a project gets a yes because it's a good idea, not because anyone checked whether there are people left that month to do it. Capacity management sets those two things side by side — demand for people and the supply of them — before it's too late to change anything.

What it is not: a rota. Nowhere does it say who is working at nine on Tuesday. It does say how many hours someone has available this month, against how many hours of work are waiting on them.

How demand and supply get recorded

Supply is recorded in a separate part of the product — resource management, the operational layer beneath capacity management — as a profile per person: hours per week, and what percentage of that is available for project work. You maintain both yourself.

That profile is a snapshot, not a schedule over time. Change someone's availability and it overwrites the previous figure — there is no way to record that someone is available full-time in the first quarter and half that in the second without editing it yourself partway through.

Leave and public holidays do count: recorded absence and public holidays reduce the available hours for the period they fall in. The base profile itself stays one percentage, not a schedule over time. And there is no skills matching — the system knows how many hours exist, not who can do what kind of work.

Why "do we have room for this" has two different answers

This is the sharpest point in the whole subject, and it is more honest to name it straight away.

There are two places where capacity gets checked against demand, and they do not calculate the same thing.

The capacity dashboard counts the hours already committed to real, decided projects — and nets them correctly against each other: if project A already claims a hundred hours of someone's time, that counts before a new project is even considered.

The view that sets an idea's demand against available capacity before a decision does not do that. It looks at a business unit's total available hours without subtracting the work already committed to decided projects — and without checking whether another idea is asking for the same hours. Two ideas each asking for eighty per cent of the same capacity both read as feasible.

That is not sloppiness — it is how the calculation works today. It is the reason "feasible" at the moment of a decision means something different from "there is actually room."

What you actually see

The capacity dashboard shows both hours and a percentage, colour-coded from under-utilised to over-allocated — per person, per week, month or quarter.

When assessing an idea you see whether the hours it asks for, per business unit, fit within what's still available, and ideas are ranked partly on that, alongside priority and deadline.

There are also what-if scenarios: you explore the effect of a different schedule or a hypothetical extra piece of demand, without committing anything yet. A saved scenario keeps its inputs so you can come back to it — the result itself is recalculated each time you reopen it.

What capacity management does not do here

There is a notification available, and it is optional: in settings, you can turn on a daily check that emails the person themselves, their resource manager, or both, once someone goes over the line. That check is off by default per organisation — anyone who does not turn it on still only sees an over-allocation by opening the dashboard themselves. And what the check does not do stays the same: it flags an over-allocation that already exists. Scheduling someone who is already over the line remains possible — the notification makes it visible, it does not stop it.

And there is no signal that a profile has gone stale. If someone left three months ago and their profile is still there, it counts exactly as before until someone edits it by hand.

How to tell whether this is happening in your own organisation

You don't need to open any screen to know whether this applies to you.

Do you know right now, without phoning anyone, how much room the most in-demand team has left this month?
When two projects want the same people at the same time, does anyone see that before both are committed to, or only once the first one is already running late?
Is there someone whose availability hasn't been updated in months, even though their role has changed?

A "no" to two of the three means the problem isn't a lack of visibility — it's that nobody has to look until it has already gone wrong.

Where capacity actually fits in the wider chain from strategy to delivery is in the guide from strategy to delivery. More on this subject is in the guides. If you're a resource or line manager yourself, the page for resource and line managers covers how this works for your own team specifically.