Capacity Planning with Repetitive Tasks

If you find yourself with staff who perform high volumes of routine tasks, you may find this worksheet useful. The top portion of the worksheet lets you figure out your actual total capacity for the department you’re looking at.

Below, that capacity is broken into three “buckets”. The first, “support capacity” lets you enter approximations of how long each task takes on average, and how many times those tasks are performed each week.

The next, “administrative capacity” lets you enter things like meetings, seeking clarification, or other work that is necessary to keep business moving. Again, you can enter guesses on duration, and how many times those events happen a week.

Those two buckets are added up as time you can’t touch. Whatever is left, is time that’s available for variable work (like projects).

When you add these three buckets together, you can see how you stand against total overall capacity. Maybe you need to cut down on the number of meetings, or reduce the number of routine tasks you do in a week to make room for a project. Or maybe you can’t realistically do the project without finding more people.