How to manage team capacity

As Engineering Manager, we should know how much load our teams can carry and learn how to balance all our workload.

When I initially started in my first team, our team got involved in discussing a new project.

That project was so important that we needed to plan the team's capacity.

We will need to balance the # of current projects, the initial estimations for this new big project, and our team members.

At that moment, we did not have a clear metric of how many tasks or points our team is able to handle, so we got the idea of doing an estimation.

How we did it:

• Get the number of team members available while we plan to work on this project.

• Ask the team members if they have plans to take holidays or any other time off so we can give them a chance to relax and enjoy their time off.

• Once we get these numbers, also we have to plan any high-priority bugs or high-priority unplan work, so we reduce at least the team capacity by 1 resource.

All those scenarios gave us the total of team members available for that project.

Hypothetical scenario:

We have to work on a project estimated to be finished in 6 weeks. We have a team of 8 people. What is the capacity of my team to finish this project?

Project timeline: 6 weeks

Team members: 8 people

Vacations/Holidays: around 1 person per week will be OoO(out of office)

High Priority resource: 1 person

Capacity = 8 people - 1 person off - 1 person taking care of other priorities

Real Capacity = 6 people

Why is it so important to consider those scenarios?

Well, this math seems to be simple; however, I had faced scenarios where it was not contemplated at all, and the team struggled so much because the project timeline was planned without considering those simple scenarios.

So, in my opinion, planning for the worst-case scenario and refining those scenarios on the go is better than making a lot of commitments at the beginning and being in a rush later.

So when you plan resources for a project, please consider the following phrase; this might help you to get your team on the right track to accomplish the projects in future.

Undercommit and Overdeliver