Atlassian Team Playbook - Capacity Planning Play

Without having a clear picture of your teammate’s availability, it’s practically impossible to plan for projects efficiently. With this Capacity Planning Play, you’ll be able to take the guesswork out of estimation and prioritization for your team’s projects in as little as 30 minutes. Here’s how to facilitate the play, step-by-step: STEP ONE: Call a team meeting. And make sure your team has proper context for the exercise. Share how projects haven’t been launching on time, or that it’s getting harder and harder to set working hour boundaries.

00:33 - Let your team know the results of this exercise will be used to better plan and prioritize future projects. STEP TWO: Agree on what you’re planning for. Once you’re in the meeting, get alignment on what you’re planning for. Are you scoping time for a sprint, or for the quarter? Are you planning for a large or small project? Are you wondering if you need to on-board another teammate? These types of questions should already be answered and agreed to before you move onto the next step. STEP THREE: Add up your individual hours. And instruct each team member to do the same.

01:10 - Everything from projects, admin time, one on ones, and coffee runs should be included. Make sure everyone knows there’s no wrong answers – and that honesty is crucial. Pick an average week from the recent past and add up how much time you allocate to each activity. Helpful places to reference are calendars, inboxes, tickets, and messaging channels. STEP FOUR: Calculate the percentage of time spent on projects. If the idea of doing math is scary, no worries – templates on our Capacity Planning page make this step easier. But in short, you’ll divide hours spent on work projects by the total number of hours from the last step. The goal here is to see how much time your team spends on projects per week. For example, if a teammate has a 40 hour work week and 10 of those hours are spent on admin tasks, town halls, one-on-ones, and coffee runs, that means 30 hours, or 75% of their time, is spent on projects. STEP FIVE: Bring everyone’s results together for a full-team picture.

02:13 - Create a table with columns for role, percent of weekly time, hours spent on the project per week, and the total sum of hours spent by role. This will help you pull actionable insights from your data in the next step. STEP SIX: Make informed allocation decisions. Now that you have a clearer picture of all teammates’ capacity, it should be easier to understand and have conversations about who can be allocated to current or future projects. For example, you might realize that analysts spend more time on admin tasks than other roles – so if you have a project that requires more analyst time it might be time to re-scope or outsource for more analysts.

02:56 - And finally, STEP SEVEN: Schedule regular check-ins. Make capacity planning a habit by setting up check-in’s to monitor changes in workload and continually improve how you estimate and prioritize projects. Will all these steps put together, you’ll have a better idea of how your team’s time is currently divvied up. Which will help you better allocate for future projects and take the guesswork out of your capacity planning. Awesome! If you want to learn more about prioritizing projects based on your new capacity planning data, check out our PRIORITIZATION PLAY, only on the Atlassian Team Playbook. .