CAPACITY PLANNING helps to focus priorities and flag any issues with team capacity. It can also all be used to spotlight areas for growth and process improvements.
Do you know… How much time you can commit to delivering for clients and keep a healthy work-life balance? Or how much time the team can commit to delivering and not face burn-out?
Over committing can result in underdelivering and jeopardizing your hard-earned reputation.
And relying on staff to ‘work a bit harder / work a bit later / work over the weekend’ can really damage productivity, reliability and long-term growth.
Two things to action now would be:
- Check your order book/backlog and work out how much time needs committing to deliver what’s been promised to the clients.
- Look at team availability (capacity) and see if it matches that promise, or not!
Working out teams capacity or utilization can be pretty straight forward and there’s loads of great guides online.
Both asana and float have covered utilization in these posts:
How to Track Utilization Rate + Drive Team Profitability • Asana
What Resource Utilization Is and How to Calculate It (float.com)
I’ll also share my own post on how I like to work it out for my teams, that includes:
- Which team member delivers which specific skills within their contracted hours.
- Annual leave, including standard and any enhanced allowance, public holidays, plus any training and volunteering days.
- Sick leave or unexpected downtime and how to anticipate it. This is a useful one to measure as better capacity planning and better processes can reduce lost time here.
- Finally and importantly, acknowledging non-productive tasks and admin. Each person will have baseline tasks they need to complete before they’re available to deliver – don’t underestimate these tasks – it’s also another opportunity to measure for future improvements. This is where you can explore software, automations, templates, non-critical tasks and tasks that could be redistributed to others.
Reducing non-productive tasks across the team can potentially free up time to convert back in to productive hours – imagine gaining an extra member of the team for free! And the extra time is there to be used. It could be charged back to clients or gifted to the team. Think early finishes on Fridays or put towards time out for self-development – There’s a huge value in found time.
So from the two actions above, if you have a full order book/backlog, nice one, and the team capacity matches the time you’ve estimated to deliver the projects you’re a Pro.
If you’re not doing it already, next step would be sharing a CAPACITY PLAN with the team to give them confidence you take the intake of work and allocation of resources seriously – the plan can be revisited and adjusted for any new business wins or changes in the team.
To create a CAPACITY PLAN there are loads of tools available to help record and visualize projects and capacity. It could be a simple Gantt chart in a spreadsheet or investing in productivity software such as Asana, Streamtime, monday.com, Wrike plus a whole host of others.
What if the results show you’ve over committed the team :O
If it’s a one off, the team probably have your back and will push on to deliver. Thank them greatly and promise you’ll put some steps in place and CAPACITY PLAN sooner rather than later – the team might not be so forgiving next time.
Now would also be a good opportunity to plan as a team. If everyone is invested in the same goal and has visibility early in the process there’s more time to prepare and build excitement for what’s coming up. They’ll probably have ideas to share on how much time should be committed and possibly suggestions on where improvements can be made to deliver smarter.
However, if over committing is a regular occurrence the time to start planning is overdue.
It’s too easy to fall in to the ‘but we’re an agile / reactive team’ trap or dressing it up as a fast-paced, high-energy (read high-emotions and high-turnover) environment.
Plan for a healthy work-life balance, not burn-out. Plan to spot opportunity and growth. Plan for visibility and shared ownership. Plan for quality, be proud of the work you do.
No resource or skill on the team to create a CAPACITY PLAN?
Treat the team, and your clients, with a new hire and expand the head-count with a Creative Operations specialist? Katie Oberthaler at Ziflow says;
Creative operations is important because the #1 objective is to improve the way work is done within creative teams. Efficient creative operations bring structure, process, and metrics to the creative workflow to optimize timeliness, capacity, and costs. It does this by looking at the creative process as a supply chain, identifying where each move can be maximized with the same (or fewer) number of resources.
You can read the full post here: Creative operations: 4 steps to success in 2021 (ziflow.com)
So to recap – PLAN.
- Check what you’re committing to clients, with
- What the team can realistically deliver
Match the two up, make the plan visible, tweak as you go and everyone should be happy’ish.*
*Some projects might be screamers, plans might have to change, capacity might go down and clients might go up.
I’ll cover more thoughts and ideas on workflow processes, improvements and planning in future posts.
And if you’re reading this from a Creative Ops background, add a comment or like so those that are interested in our field can read more about what we do.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
