Team capacity planning: how to put an end to overtime and project delays

At the start of the quarter, the COO asks team managers how many projects they can take on. Each one multiplies the number of people by the working days and eight hours, subtracts what they already have and gives a figure. Added up, everything fits. Three months later, two projects are a month late and people are exhausted.

The problem is not the people but the calculation. It is usually down to three things that are easy to overlook when planning.

The simplest way to show this is with one person and one quarter. The figures in the table below are assumptions – use your own data from HR and the team’s calendars.

In this example, of the 520 nominal hours, about 370 are left for projects, or about 71%. If the manager plans for the full 520 hours, the team will be overloaded by more than 40% (520 / 370 ≈ 1.4). Good intentions will not make that gap disappear – it will come back as delays or overtime.

For teams that spend a lot of time on customer service or support tickets, the figure may be lower. That is why it is worth measuring it in practice once. For two to three weeks, ask people to keep a rough record of how much time they spend on projects and how much on everything else.

Workload planning only works when it covers three time horizons. Each serves different decisions and different people, as the table below shows.

The quarterly level is the one most often missing. The manager sees their week, the board sees the annual budget, but nobody checks whether the projects planned for the next three months will fit into the teams. That is where most delays originate.

In many companies, the plan covers only the projects on the board’s list. Yet the same people serve customers, fix errors in solutions already delivered and respond to urgent requests from other departments. This work does not disappear just because it is not in the plan.

The simplest solution is to reserve a fixed share of each person’s time for it. For example, an IT administrator who maintains the company’s systems might have only 40% of their time planned for projects and 60% for incoming support requests. A salesperson who helps with a rollout at a customer’s site might have no more than 20% of their time for that project, because selling takes up the rest.

Set the reserve based on the measurement from the previous section, not on gut feeling. Once a quarter, check whether it held, and adjust it if day-to-day work regularly goes over the agreed limit.

Every switch between projects costs time: you have to remember where you left off and get back into the detail. That is why we recommend a simple rule: no more than two or three projects at a time per person. It is also better for someone to work on one project for several days in a row than to split every day into pieces.

Conflicts show up in the plan well in advance, if someone looks at it. Once a month, mid-month, team managers and the person responsible for projects review the workload for the next six to eight weeks. They look for places where two projects need the same people at the same time.

Each such conflict needs a decision now, not when the project is already running late. The options are always much the same: postpone the start of one project, reduce its scope, bring in someone from another team or outsource part of the work.

The board does not need a list of thousands of tasks. It needs a few indicators that show whether the company is taking on more than its people can handle. The set below is enough for most mid-sized companies.

Set your own targets, but stick to one principle: utilisation that is constantly close to 100% of real availability is not a success but a warning sign. A team with no slack at all has no time for the unexpected or for improving its own work.

When the plan exceeds capacity, the gap is usually covered by overtime. The Polish Labour Code allows overtime for the employer’s special needs, but sets limits. The limit is 150 hours a year per person, unless the workplace rules, a collective agreement or the employment contract set a different one. Average weekly working time including overtime also may not exceed 48 hours in the settlement period.

Let us take a hypothetical example. Ten people stay late for an average of 4 hours a week, which is about 17 hours a month and more than 200 hours a year. At a rate of PLN 50 an hour plus a 50% supplement, each overtime hour costs PLN 75. That is PLN 12,750 a month (10 × 17 × PLN 75), or about PLN 153,000 a year.

On top of that comes a legal problem: more than 200 hours a year exceeds the basic limit of 150 hours. So constant overtime built into the plan is not a solution, but a sign that the company needs a different order of projects or another person. Work out whether hiring would be cheaper.

The tool should take data from the system people already work in, not require everything to be entered twice. So the choice depends mainly on where your teams manage their tasks today. You will find a comparison of the most common options in the table below.

In a small team of up to a dozen or so people, a spreadsheet with availability for the quarter and a weekly conversation between the manager and the team is often enough. A specialised tool makes sense when several teams share the same people across many projects.

The most common mistakes are planning 100% of time instead of real availability, and a plan that covers only projects without day-to-day work. The third is not comparing plan with actual once a project ends – so subsequent plans are just as wrong. The fourth is a plan drawn up by one person without the team managers, which is out of touch with reality from day one.

Start the rollout with data from the last two quarters: what was planned, what was achieved and how much overtime there was. This kind of analysis usually convinces the board more effectively than any presentation. Then introduce changes in the order shown below.