Agency Capacity Planner

Agency Capacity Planner: practical plan

Capacity review

Available capacity

For each role, calculate working hours after leave, internal meetings, sales, training, support and unplanned work. Reserve an explicit buffer; do not plan every hour as billable.

Demand by client

Map committed hours, skill mix, milestones, deadlines, dependencies, review time and change requests. Separate signed work from likely pipeline.

Scenarios

• Current: existing clients and committed work.
• Both starts: assume both projects begin.
• Staggered: defer one project or phase work.

Bottleneck analysis

Identify roles with overload, scarce skills, review queues and handoff risk. Compare hiring, contractor support, scope changes, reprioritization and delayed starts.

Decision rules

Set maximum utilization, overtime and deadline risk thresholds. Require leadership approval to accept work beyond capacity.

Weekly dashboard

Show role-level load, unstaffed work, utilization range, delivery risk and upcoming leave. Protect employee privacy and use planning data for resourcing, not individual performance scoring.

Measurement and review

Record the baseline, source, date range, denominator and owner. Use one primary measure plus quality guardrails; compare like-for-like cohorts and disclose missing data. Treat estimates as scenarios, not observed outcomes.

Risks and controls

Check relevance, consent, disclosure, workload and downside before scaling. Keep an evidence trail, obtain human review for material commitments, and pause if trust, quality or compliance signals deteriorate.

Next steps

1. Confirm the goal, audience and available capacity.
2. Gather the minimum evidence for a first test.
3. Assign an owner, budget and review date.
4. Run a small pilot, record outcomes and decide whether to iterate, expand or stop.