How 3 technical teams solved their capacity planning problems with Runn

Most planning tools only show you what's happening right now. By the time something changes – priorities shift or a deal closes early – that view is already out of date.

With the right resource management and capacity planning software, technical teams can look further ahead and trust the numbers they're looking at. Here's how three companies planning people across custom software and IT work did exactly that with Runn, in their own words.

Denver Technology: forecasting six months ahead

Denver Technology delivers engineering consulting, project delivery, and managed services across operational technology (OT) and IT. That means juggling specialist people, live project timelines, and a pipeline of opportunities that haven't landed yet.

For a long time, their plans only showed confirmed work, because the team had been pulling resourcing forecasts from a project management system that only ever reflected what was already signed. That made it more difficult to understand the impact of potential work on future capacity, prompting Denver Technology to look for a dedicated IT capacity planning tool.

They needed a tool built to handle pipeline, not just confirmed delivery. Runn's platform offered exactly what they needed: tentative projects for pipeline forecasting, team utilization and capacity planning, and visual resource planning.

With Runn, Denver Technology's planning process starts the moment a proposal goes out. Project managers can create tentative projects while a deal is still being quoted, giving them an early read on delivery requirements, team capacity, and realistic start dates before the client signs.

As Operations Manager Brad Hardwicke explains, that shift changed how his team answered important questions: "We've been able to utilize tentative projects when we're estimating work for our clients. If we were to win this opportunity, what would it look like? When would we be able to do it? Who would do that work?"

Three months after implementing Runn, Denver Technology had gone from planning a few weeks out to holding months of pipeline forecasts and project allocations at once. Today, the team plans a full six months ahead, with confirmed and tentative work visible side by side. That visibility has translated into resourcing forecasts accurate to within 0.4% of actual utilization.

"For the first time, we were able to have a six-month view of our potential work and our project load across the delivery team. We were seeing what we needed, where we needed it, and what we were able to take on."

Rocket Science Group: trusting the math enough to plan on it

Rocket Science Group operates across three divisions – backend infrastructure, game development, and live operations – with roughly 145 people spread across Wales, England, and the USA. Coordinating that many moving parts across time zones is a constant balancing act between people, projects, and profitability.

The team managed availability and project plans across time zones in spreadsheets. As Co-Founder and President Brian Corrigan explains, the math behind resource planning is more layered than it may look at first glance:

"Resource planning for us is inherently multi-dimensional. When you're dealing with partial allocations across projects, internal work, and time off, the math gets complicated very quickly. If that foundation isn't right, everything built on top of it starts to break down."

Not having total trust that the numbers were right once enough variables stacked up is what pushed Rocket Science Group to look for a tool built specifically to hold up under that complexity.

"That's why Runn stands out – the allocation and utilization math is dialed in. It's better than any product I've used in my career."

With a solid foundation, the team could build on it with confidence, including planning for skills, not just hours:

"If we know we've got work coming in that requires specific roles or skills, we can plan for that early, whether that's hiring, contracting, or shifting work across teams. We're not just thinking about capacity, we're thinking about capability."

That trust in the underlying numbers is also what makes Rocket Science Group's six-to-nine-month view of capacity and demand useful in practice. With a clear view of capacity, leadership can now shift a project's start date to fit around existing workload. The payoff shows up directly in utilization, which has climbed 5-6% over the past year:

"When you're operating on margin, even a few percentage points make a real difference – that's where profitability is won or lost."

Ollion: replacing five sets of forecasts with one

Ollion came together in 2023 through a merger with five other companies – which meant five different systems, formats, and cost rates all feeding into capacity planning at once. For Csaba Muha, Ollion's Head of Governance and Operations – APAC, the priority was clear: replace that patchwork with a single, scalable resource management system the whole business could rely on, without needing a dedicated team to run it.

Runn's interface made adoption far easier than the leadership team expected: "It was so easy for our staff to adopt Runn that they didn't need any training and the transition took just two days."

The bigger shift came after adoption. With operational teams no longer working from different systems and cost rates, Ollion could finally see utilization and allocation across the whole business in one place, rather than stitching it together team by team:

"With Runn, we reduced our operational footprint and increased profitability. The synergy between teams is much stronger, and everyone now works from a single source of truth."

That single view of capacity mattered most during a period of restructuring, when Ollion needed to understand not just who was working on what, but whether that work lined up with the company's goals – the kind of capacity planning challenge many cloud consultancies face as they scale. Real-time data made it possible to compare where teams were expected to spend their time against where they actually were, and to rebalance people against work.

For Muha, that shift changed the kind of decisions capacity data could support:

"In our fast-paced business, we deal with a lot of 'what if' scenarios. Since our people are our greatest asset, it's all about understanding their utilization and the revenue they bring in. With better visibility, we can make proactive decisions – whether it's hiring, restructuring, or tweaking processes – rather than reacting to problems after they come up."

Forecasting capacity used to take multiple days of management attention each month. Now it takes a few hours, the result of one reliable capacity picture to check, rather than multiple that never quite agreed with each other, and teams and projects staying better aligned as a result.

The same problem, three different triggers

Denver Technology's gap showed up in its sales pipeline. Rocket Science Group's showed up in the math itself. Ollion's showed up as different views of capacity that never quite aligned.

These are different triggers that need the same fix: one accurate, real-time view of capacity that the whole team can plan against.

Curious how Runn can help your team? See how it works and get your own view of what's coming.