Scenario planning

Scenario planning is the practice of running the same capacity calculation across several plausible futures and reading them next to each other. A studio might keep a base scenario built from confirmed work only, an upside scenario that adds the highest-confidence pitches and a downside scenario that assumes a key renewal slips by a quarter. Each scenario produces its own allocated, available, needed and gap numbers per trade, so leadership can compare what each future demands of the team.

The honest use of scenarios is to make pre-commitment trade-offs visible. If the upside scenario shows a 1,400-hour gap in senior 3D for the next quarter, leadership can decide today whether that gap is worth a hire, a contractor budget or a polite no on the pitch. Without scenarios, the same conversation usually happens after the contract is signed, when options are narrower and more expensive.

Related: tentative project, demand forecasting, executive horizon.