Capacity planning

Capacity planning is the discipline of estimating how much work an organization can take on and matching that to the people available to do it. In professional services, it usually compares hours or full-time equivalents of supply against the hours or roles a portfolio of confirmed and tentative projects will require over a future window. The planning horizon is typically expressed in weeks, months or quarters and varies by industry.

A simple version of the calculation per trade per period is supply minus demand. If a studio has 12 senior 3D artists with 1,920 productive hours each over the quarter and confirmed projects already need 21,000 hours of senior 3D, the gap is 2,040 hours, roughly the equivalent of one extra artist. Surfacing that gap before the quarter starts is the point of the exercise.

Related: demand forecasting, capacity matrix, executive view.