Capacity Planning Template: Download Here
Quick Visuals for Easy Planning: Our capacity planning template makes it easier to understand team availability and resource allocation, and it's easy to adapt to your specific time frames and project requirements.
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Having a quick, easy, and visual way to see how your team’s capacity and how their time is allocated can make your job as a project manager a lot easier. That is why I’ve created this downloadable and customizable capacity planning template.
Capacity Planning Template
This project capacity planning template is your playbook. It’s currently set up for planning capacity for a week-long sprint (to help you spot any short-term resources gaps or issues like over or underbooking), but you can easily adjust it to your needs.
Do you plan your team’s work in 2 week sprints? Simply adjust the available number of working hours accordingly. It’s compatible with both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, and the template also includes a filled-in sample so you can see what it looks like while it’s in use.
Why It’s Important To Use A Capacity Planning Template
Using a capacity planning template can bring consistency and routine to your team capacity planning. Use this template for both resource planning and resource allocation.
- Highlight resourcing needs: The capacity planning template will help you determine whether there are any additional human resources required for your projects and where all of your project resources are allocated, especially if you manage a large number of projects. Good resource management involves planning proactively to fill gaps, and a capacity planning template can help you do that.
- Help balance the team’s workload: If you group all of your team members by their function in the template, you can view sub-team capacity and balance workloads out where needed. For example, if your graphic design team has 2 designers who are each overbooked by 3 hours and 1 designer who is underbooked by 8 hours, see if you can shift 6 hours’ worth of work to the underbooked designer so that the 2 who are overbooked aren’t incurring overtime while their colleague looks for things to do.
- Account for all time in each person’s day: While it is easy to split out a person’s time based on projects they’re working on, there is a lot more to capacity planning. Going through the exercise helps you think about what the person will really be doing. Projects ebb and flow, and you need to consider other company meetings and tasks. Following a capacity planning process makes it easier to document other tasks that might take a person away from project work.
- Saves time: Asking each team member to fill out their capacity plan for the week (or another time period) and then reviewing it can save you a lot of time and make the workflow more efficient. This way, you can focus your time and energy on the things that really matter.
- Provides consistency: Monitoring team member capacity the same way week after week provides consistency in the planning process. You can also use the template in conjunction with your time tracking tools to point out gaps between the plan and the actuals. You shouldn’t expect every week to go to plan, but consistent data can reveal patterns. For example, if your developer is setting aside ten hours each week for a project and barely using 5, shift next week’s plan to more closely reflect reality.
How To Use The Capacity Planning Template
If you’re new to workforce capacity planning or have never used a template before, here are a few tips to get started.
- Prepare the template for your project needs: Download the template and customize it for your project demands. Adjust for the time period you want to plan, the team members you need to plan for, and the projects or overhead activities you need to include. My template is divided into two sections: one for billable work and one for nonbillable time (e.g. PTO, department meetings, and training/conferences). Add or update the categories as you see fit, and be sure to update the corresponding formulas so the totals are calculated correctly. Make a note of each team member’s available bandwidth, especially if you have some part-time team members.
- Have your team fill out the template: Once your template is ready for use, share it with the team and ask them to fill in their time. This may include any PTO they plan to take in the time period you are planning for.
- Review the template with relevant leaders: Review the template once the team has filled in the template. This might involve conversations with other leaders or stakeholders. If you see that someone’s planned time is significantly over or under their available time, work with your colleagues to adjust it. Can work be pushed back or pulled forward? Do you need to reassign work? Who can it be reassigned to? Share your decisions with the team, and take the time to orient the team members you’ve reassigned the work to who may be taking on new, less familiar tasks. This may include a quick overview of the project, the tasks, and any additional stakeholders.
- Compare planned time with the actual time spent: If you’re using time tracking, pull reports at the end of each planned period to see how the actual time spent compares with your plan. It’s unreasonable to expect perfection, but look for big changes from the plan. Some things, like a team member being out sick, cannot be avoided, but if week over week you are seeing someone not hit their planned billable because of a blocker on a project, that is something you want to address.
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