Hello!
Hope everyone is doing well 
I’ve been thinking a bit about capacity planning recently as we (RadHR core team) move towards our 2027 work planning. As a small team working part-time who are conscious of avoiding an overwork/burnout culture, we’ve generally sought to prioritise ways of doing work planning to build in spaciousness while remaining clear and supportive.
At the moment we use a capacity planning spreadsheet where we compile all of our paid hours, lay out all of our work areas, set our names against them, then estimate a rough number of days per month (DPM) for each work area. This give us a rough guide to whether we’re planning work for the capacity we actually have. From there we try and plan for our ‘realistic capacity’, which we calculate as ~80% of our total hours as a team, to account for the fact that we’re not robots and will likely have to juggle leave, sickness, delays, etc. throughout the year. This is working fairly well for us in terms of easing task overload, but it’s quite a blunt instrument and usually acts as as jumping-off point for wider discussions about how we’re holding work collectively, as opposed to something more granular that we can refer back to over time.
I am really keen to hear if anyone has an approach to capacity planning in their org that they wouldn’t mind sharing, or if they have any recommendations for particular resources on collective capacity planning for small orgs? Particularly keen to hear about / read things on approaches that prioritise flexibility/reflection/worker wellbeing.
Veronica