A Model of Efficiency: Kanban helps you prioritize tasks effectively, make sure that teams are focused on what matters, and prevents bottlenecks that can hinder productivity and progress.
Easy Capacity Planning: Kanban's work-in-progress limits and workflow visualization features allow you to measure ongoing work, manage workloads, and make sure your team isn't overwhelmed.
Boost Team Collaboration: Kanban lets team members easily understand each other's workloads and jump in and help others when capacity allows, which builds better collaboration.
Kanban is a helpful methodology for prioritizing tasks, preventing bottlenecks, and implementing more adaptive planning. But it can also be used for capacity planning—measuring and keeping track of in-progress work and what each team member has on their plates.
In this guide, I’ll discuss why Kanban capacity planning is essential and how to use it to keep your team productive and to deliver successful projects that accomplish their intended goals efficiently.
What Is Kanban?
Kanban is a visual workflow management method. It’s based around a visual board that represents the flow of work and the status of tasks at any given moment. Each card on the board represents a task, and the column it’s in represents the stage of work or status.
For example, if you're leading a software development team tasked with creating a new application, you would set up a Kanban board divided into columns for "To Do," "In Progress," "Review," and "Done." This lets you see the project flow and identify potential bottlenecks.

What Is Capacity Planning?
Capacity planning focuses on balancing project workloads with your team's capacity. You’ll assess how much work the team can handle without getting overwhelmed or compromising quality.
This process will help you make informed decisions about task prioritization, resource allocation, and project timelines, as well as keep the team productive and able to meet their goals.
You can assess the team’s capacity by looking at the number of tasks in each column on your Kanban board and the WIP limits you’ve set. Suppose they've reached their WIP limit in a specific column. You’ll need to allocate additional resources or reprioritize tasks to avoid delays.
Why Use Kanban For Capacity Planning?
There are many worthwhile benefits to using Kanban for capacity planning:
- Limits to work in progress, which helps keep the team focused and productive
- You can prioritize and reprioritize tasks by simply dragging around the cards and columns on the board
- It’s easy to see and prevent bottlenecks by monitoring the amount of work in each column at any given time
- It’s flexible for dynamic environments where project requirements frequently shift, and the team can respond swiftly to new information or challenges
- It allows for adaptive planning and can easily accommodate changes in priorities
How To Manage Capacity Planning With Kanban
Here are some strategies for managing capacity with Kanban in project management:
1. Establish Clear Work in Progress Limits
Set work in progress (WIP) limits that reflect your team's capacity. Consider factors such as team size, skill sets, and task complexity. Realistic WIP limits help you make sure the team isn’t overworked and can maintain a sustainable work pace.
Let’s say you're leading a product development team of four. You might limit the number of tasks in the "In Progress" column to four. This will allow each team member to focus on quality while avoiding burnout.
2. Analyze and Calculate Your Team's Capacity
When you calculate capacity, take into account team size, available work hours, and historical performance data.
If your team consists of five members working 40 hours a week, with an average completion rate of ten weekly tasks, your total capacity would be 50 weekly tasks. This figure provides a benchmark to help you effectively plan, prioritize, and forecast resources for future work so you can keep the team’s work manageable.
3. Manage Task Dependencies
Dependencies (where one task relies on another being completed or started first) can significantly impact your capacity planning. Clearly define the relationships between tasks and identify potential issues. Then, allocate and balance your resources accordingly.
Consider using color-coding or visual indicators on your Kanban board, which can help highlight dependencies and make it easier for the team to see the impact of one task on another.
This also helps you keep an eye on tasks that are actually in progress, as opposed to those that haven’t been started due to a dependency (meaning your team member might have some extra capacity for another priority).

4. Prioritize Tasks
Task and project priorities can significantly affect your capacity planning, resource allocation, and management. Implement a prioritization framework, such as the MoSCoW method (must have, should have, could have, won't have), to help you and your team decide which tasks to tackle first.
Once you’ve prioritized, your team can focus on completing the must-have items before moving on to less critical tasks. If you know what team members are currently working on, you can plan around that existing capacity before assigning them new work.
5. Closely Monitor Progress
Review the Kanban board and team capacity regularly to keep an eye on progress and make necessary adjustments. This will help you assess whether the current WIP limits and capacity estimates remain effective.
If the team is consistently reaching the WIP limits or struggling to complete tasks, reevaluate your capacity calculations and adjust your team's workloads to improve performance.
6. Maintain Regular Communication and Collaboration
Regularly discuss progress and roadblocks with the Kanban team. If one team member is struggling with a particular task, others can offer support or redistribute tasks to maintain momentum.
Conduct daily or frequent stand-up meetings, as well as individual meetings with each team member, to discuss the current workload, completed tasks, and ongoing work, as well as address any challenges.
This helps you identify early on when a team member isn't going to meet a deadline, for example, so you can decide how to redistribute work or provide assistance, based on the rest of the team’s capacity.
7. Use Metrics and Data Analysis
Use metrics and data analysis to make capacity planning decisions. This involves setting and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team such as cycle time, lead time, and throughput.
If you notice tasks in a specific column consistently take longer than expected, you can allocate additional resources to that stage or streamline the process.
8. Remain Flexible
Remain flexible and open to changes, and make adjustments as you gather feedback from team members and observe the workflow in action. If a specific WIP limit doesn't deliver the expected results, say, you can reassess and try different limits until you find what works best for your team.
Regularly conduct retrospectives to reflect on performance and identify areas for improvement. This involves analyzing what went well and what didn’t on your project after you’ve completed it. Based on this analysis, you can adjust your team's WIP limits or workflows accordingly.
Tools For Kanban Capacity Planning
Software tools like resource management tools and capacity planning software can automate many of the key processes in capacity planning like calculating capacity and utilization, adjusting schedules and due dates, and assigning team members to specific tasks. This saves you time and effort for strategic decision-making.
Look for these features and capabilities:
- A user-friendly interface
- Personalized dashboards
- Easy task tracking and management
- Automatic notifications for dependencies
- Data visualization to identify trends
- Simple card creation and WIP limits
- Robust reporting and analytics
- Ability to assess team performance and identify areas for improvement
Make sure that the capacity planning or resource management tool you use integrates with your Kanban software so that both tools are using the same, up-to-date data and to avoid having to copy and paste information from one tool into another.
Mistakes To Avoid With Kanban Capacity Planning
Keep these common pitfalls in mind when implementing agile capacity planning.
1. Underestimating the Importance of WIP Limits
WIP limits that are too high will overwhelm team members and increase cycle times, but if the WIP limit is too low, it can cause unnecessary delays in task completion.
If a software development team sets a WIP limit of five tasks per person, but the team is consistently working on seven or eight tasks at a time, productivity will go down due to increased context switching and decreased focus.

2. Neglecting to Review and Adjust Kanban Capacity Planning
Kanban is not a set-it-and-forget-it practice. Each project is different, and as circumstances change, you must review and adjust how you’ve allocated your resources. This requires continuous monitoring and adaptation.
If a marketing team fails to review its backlog regularly, say, you can miss opportunities to prioritize high-impact tasks or eliminate bottlenecks. Hold regular retrospectives and make updates to your Kanban board to keep your team agile and responsive to changing demands.
3. Failing to Involve the Entire Team in Capacity Planning
If you don’t include everyone in the planning and task assignment process, this creates a disconnect between your team's capabilities and workload expectations, and the team will struggle with unrealistic workloads and deadlines.
Encourage collaboration and open communication during capacity planning to help keep everyone on the same page and promote a sense of ownership among the team.
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