Capacity management problems, solved: tactics & tools from professional people planners

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Key takeaways:

• Capacity management is a complex process with multiple moving parts, and challenges are unavoidable
• Your best way forward is to maintain a capacity management system that gives you a live, accurate view of your team’s time
• This enables you to mitigate the impact of challenges—and even prevent potential issues before they occur 

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If you’re reading this, you probably have a few capacity-related concerns keeping you up at night  👻

And we don’t blame you—it’s not hard to feel haunted when you’re dealing with:

• Derailed timelines, with no clear path forward to catch up 
• Frustrated stakeholders breathing down your neck about a missed due date
• Yet another massive client project coming your way—and no clue if your team can actually take it on without working overtime for the second week in a row

What if we told you we could put an end to your nightmares, right… 

NOW ✨  

This article shares the eight most common challenges in capacity management, as told by resource managers, operations leaders, and team leads—and the proven tactics they use to overcome them.

1. Lack of visibility into team capacity 

Many teams don’t have shared access to a live, centralized view of team availability—and this gap means information about who is overbooked and who might have capacity for additional work is often scattered across different systems or buried in individual calendars. 

Spreadsheets and project management software—two go-to people planning tools—just aren’t built for dynamic capacity planning processes:

• Spreadsheets are inflexible, disconnected from other tools, and prone to human error (in fact, after switching from a spreadsheet to a dedicated resource management tool, a full-service agency realized they had previously missed up to 10,000 trackable hours) 
• Project management tools can’t present capacity data at the individual, team, and custom filtered-view level. They show you what your team is working on, but not how much of their time is being utilized over the next weeks and months.

Without visibility into people’s true capacity, organizations struggle with issues like overburdened teams, missed deadlines, and inefficient resource allocation. 

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Nick Patterson

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Co-CEO of STORM+SHELTER

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The diary view in Asana alone couldn’t give us a good idea of what was happening. It was really difficult for us to get a big picture, look at how busy we were and who was being scheduled on what—especially if multiple tasks were going on in one day.

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🛠️ How to fix it

Use dedicated resource management software to track capacity

Spreadsheets and project management software, though powerful people planning tools, are lacking in a couple of capacity management areas.

Resource management software like Float is built for capacity management and resource allocation, giving you a real-time view of your team’s availability. It enables you to track resource availability by combining real-time data from calendars, project management tools, and even Slack.

If your team is at risk of capacity overload, you can spot it in time and make changes to allocations in moments. 

2. Inaccurate perception of your team’s true capacity

A 40-hour work week doesn’t translate to 40 hours of productive work. Admin tasks, meetings, interruptions, and even unexpected absences or sick days all chip away at your team’s productive hours.

Planning without considering these factors leads to misconceptions about available capacity—you could end up accidentally overloading your team. 

🛠️ How to fix it

Determine your team’s baseline capacity 

Finding your team’s actual capacity requires taking a holistic view of how their time is spent at work. 

• First, set work hours, employment types, and time off in your resource management tool to accurately gauge how much time individual team members have for billable project work. 
• Then, investigate non-project activities (like internal meetings or training) that impact team members’ billable time, and account for these in your plans. 

If you are using Float, you can set your team’s standard work schedule, customize individual work hours, add leave policies, and integrate Google and Outlook calendars for a true, 360-degree view of team capacity. 

💡 Find out how to set up capacity management processes in Float, complete with easy-to-follow tutorial videos 

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Pro tip: for accurate capacity information, go to the source

Nobody understands true capacity more than the people doing the work. Keep communication lines open with managers and team members to align your expectations of capacity with reality. 

You might just discover that your video editor gets multiple ad hoc requests per week that take time away from projects they’re assigned to, or that a copywriter has been quietly pulled in to help on another team’s project.

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3. Constant changes in capacity 

Your team’s capacity is always changing. Extended timelines, increased resource demand due to seasonality, unexpected project delays, and reprioritization can leave your team under- or overallocated.

Variability in capacity levels makes planning difficult, and puts your team in danger of having more work than they can handle. 

🛠️ How to fix it

Meet regularly to discuss team capacity 

Run resource capacity planning meetings at a regular cadence to monitor changes in resource availability and streamline processes. Ensure you invite key stakeholders, such as account managers, project managers, creative directors, and team managers, who allocate work or provide input on resources.

In these meetings, use a visual, easy-to-understand tool like Float to review team members’ current capacity and resource utilization rates and identify where changes are needed.

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Maike Jahnens

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Head of Financial Operations and Capacity Management at Scholz & Friends

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Once a week, we have a virtual capacity planning meeting with account managers and creative directors in which we go through projects in Float to see team workloads and availability and answer important questions like: Is this project properly planned? How much time can we allocate to tentative projects without blocking confirmed projects? Can we predict how much work is coming in?

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Set processes in place to ensure capacity information is updated 

Even with a resource management system in place, governance is essential for accurate capacity information. If your team tracks their time, send reminders to ensure everyone completes their timesheets. 

Remember those capacity management meetings we mentioned? They’re the ideal setting to ensure that every allocation is updated and in order. Outside of meetings, you can easily drag and drop allocations as changes happen (that’s if you’re using Float 😉). 

Plan team time off in advance

Encourage your team members to set their regional holidays (or use a resource management tool that does this automatically) and time off in advance to help everyone know when team members will be unavailable. These dates don’t have to be fixed, but should give a general idea of availability.

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🏆 The #1 tool trusted by 4,500 of the world’s top teams

Why do companies like Atlassian, BuzzFeed, Ogilvy, and Deloitte choose Float for capacity management? Kick off a free 14-day trial and find out!

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4. Difficulty balancing incoming and ongoing work 

Sadly, projects don’t wait for one to stop before another one starts (but how great would that be? 🥲). You need to ensure that incoming work doesn’t interfere with ongoing work, while avoiding overloading your team.

If not handled well, ongoing work can be thrown off track or paused as you scramble to allocate incoming tasks. In cases where there are no extra resources and timelines are short, you might have to lean on your team to get work done, leading to decreased productivity and even burnout.

🛠️ How to fix it

Create a framework for prioritization 

Your team has a finite amount of time and can only get so much done. The best way to handle this challenge? Prioritize. 

Emily Feliciano, the Senior Creative Resource Manager at the software company Atlassian, receives almost 100 resource requests every week. Here are some questions she asks to help her decide how to schedule resources across multiple projects 👇

• 💰 Is there a significant budget attached? Assess the project’s financial impact. Projects with larger budgets may require more immediate attention due to their effect on your organization’s bottom line.
• 🫂 Are we mending a broken relationship with a client we really want to salvage? ‘Second chance projects’ that can repair or strengthen key client relationships should come first.  
• 🤝 Is this a new opportunity to partner with a client we have been seeking for a long time? If there’s a chance that a project will open doors to long-desired partnerships, you should prioritize it.
• 🪜 What is the level of importance in getting this work accomplished? Find out from stakeholders and senior management the priority levels of different projects in relation to each other.
• ⏳ Is there flexibility in the timeline for us to deliver? If there’s some room in the project schedule, you can move it to the end of the queue to deal with a project with tighter due dates. 

Use scenario planning to look ahead

While a project is still in the pipeline, use scenario planning to allocate resources to tasks and see how new tasks might affect ongoing work.

A resource management tool like Float lets you plan for future demands with a Tentative Project feature and placeholder roles for positions that are not yet filled. This approach allows you to visualize potential scenarios, spot bottlenecks, and make informed decisions to ensure work moves smoothly.

5. Unexpected team absences

When team members fall ill or need to take unplanned time off, you are left to deal with reduced capacity. If there’s no one else available with the same skills, you might have to delay your projects and risk unhappy clients or stakeholders. 

While you can’t completely avoid these absences, you can implement safeguards to reduce their impact.

🛠️ How to fix it 

Build in buffers for staffing contingencies 

Add extra time to your project plan to create wiggle room. You can use either percentage-based or time-based buffers to ensure your team has enough time to address any unexpected fluctuations in capacity.

💡 Learn how to create a smart contingency plan for high-risk projects

Reach out to other offices to access available resources

Teams with multiple offices and a shared, central capacity planning schedule can tap into the resources available in other locations.

Scholz & Friends, a global agency with team members spread across five offices, uses Float to filter by skill and find people on other regional teams who have capacity to work on understaffed projects. 

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Comfort Agemo

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Senior Capacity and Freelance Manager at Scholz & Friends

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If I’m looking for someone who can do motion design, but all my motion designers are currently busy, I can use filters in Float to see who else within our offices has this skill and is available. For example, I might find a motion designer in the Hamburg office and then connect with the capacity managers in Berlin to see if they are a good fit for the project. 

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Outsource work to contractors or freelancers 

We consider this a last resort because working with freelancers can lead to cost overruns or reduced profit margins—but it can be worth it to complete the project successfully.

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Lauren O’Halloran

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Head of Production at Toaster

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If teams from our other offices don’t have the capacity to take on the project within our estimated timeframe, we’ll start exploring other options, like talking to freelancers or other external partners we have worked with before, to find a suitable solution.

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6. Faulty resource demand forecasts

You thought a task would be a one-person job that could be done in a day. Turns out it’s a three-person job requiring several days 🫠 It happens to the best of us.

In cases like these, there may not be enough people to complete the project, and there’s a very high chance of not finding people to reallocate work to. 

🛠️ How to fix it

Look at trends in historical data 

Data from past projects can help create accurate forecasts, and it’s especially helpful if you’ve worked on similar projects before. 

Review the number of people and amount of time allocated to projects. If you use Float, you can use the Report dashboard to compare the time scheduled for each project with how long it actually took to complete. 

7. Skill shortages affecting resource availability

Having fewer skilled people than required increases pressure on those available to handle work across various projects. This can lead to projects being paused or delayed.

🛠️ How to fix it

Monitor capacity by skill

Use your resource management tool to track capacity by skill set. For example, Accounts and Legal use People tags in Float to assign skills to each team member, making it possible to filter by skill set and see when capacity is tightening. If they notice a consistent reduction in capacity for a particular skill, they advocate for hiring a new team member.

Encourage upskilling

Promoting growth within your team ensures you have more skilled resources to draw from. Encourage team members to upskill by:

• Giving opportunities to participate in learning and development (L&D) programs
• Arranging for them to shadow skilled colleagues
• Assigning them a broad range of tasks to expand their skill set

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Jason Fisher

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Co-Founder and Global Studio Director at Flight Story

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If people prefer a mix of tasks, it’s a good idea to schedule and manage their projects so they gain exposure to various aspects of their roles and different parts of the business.

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8. Reduced workforce 

For the past few years, team sizes have been reduced by two cataclysmic events, the Great Resignation and the Great Layoffs (yes, we came up with that one 😓). 

People managing capacity have to complete the same projects with fewer people and smaller budgets.

🛠️ How to fix (or, at least, handle) it 

Have regular meetings to discuss allocations 

With a smaller workforce, regular checks are more crucial than ever to ensure that people are not constantly overloaded with projects. 

A Float customer who experienced a workforce reduction started running daily standups with the team to review allocations. Everyone attended and was given the opportunity to express their concerns about workloads or flag tight due dates. Based on their feedback, project managers would reschedule tasks.

Negotiate due dates with clients and stakeholders

Rescheduling tasks can be challenging or even impossible when timelines are fixed. However, with a smaller workforce, you might need to ask clients or stakeholders for more time. 

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Thomas Walters

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Head of Studio Movember

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Our color-coded Schedule in Float allows me to very quickly show someone why their work can’t be done on the day they want it. They take one look at our timeline and instantly understand the challenges we face, and together, we can work on a way forward rather than being stuck at an impasse.

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To avoid any blows to customer satisfaction, use data to make a strong case for rescheduling. For example, the live Schedule and capacity reports in Float are two visual ways to see what your team is working on and how their time is being utilized.

[fs-toc-omit] Face capacity management challenges head-on with Float

Capacity management challenges come with the territory. 

While there’s no way to stop them for good, you can prevent and reduce their impact if you have the right capacity planning strategies and capacity planning tools in place. 

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Tackle capacity management problems with confidence 😎

Float gives you a high-level view of your team’s workload, availability, and project pipeline to plan resources with incredible accuracy.

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📚 Want to learn more about capacity planning?

This was just the beginning! We have a bunch of additional resources for you 👇

• A (very) comprehensive overview of all things capacity planning
• Our top 7 picks for the best capacity planning software out there
• A how-to guide for capacity management done the right way
• A list of agile capacity planning tips for teams that work in sprints
• Tools and tactics to create an actionable capacity planning report your entire team benefits from

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