| name | capacity-planning |
| description | Plan operational team or process capacity from demand, service expectations, work mix, variability, constraints, and recovery margin without confusing organizational capacity with Fleet node scheduling. |
Operational Capacity Planning
Use when recurring operational demand must be matched to people, process, vendor, or service capacity over a planning horizon.
Procedure
- Define the demand units, service expectations, planning horizon, and work categories whose effort or bottlenecks differ materially.
- Measure recent arrival rate, seasonality, backlog, completion rate, lead time, rework, escalation, and exceptional load where data exists.
- Estimate effective capacity after meetings, maintenance, leave, interrupts, training, and specialized-skill constraints rather than using nominal headcount alone.
- Identify bottleneck roles, approvals, vendors, tools, or process stages that limit throughput before adding generalized capacity.
- Model expected demand plus reasonable variability and recovery margin for incidents or backlog spikes.
- Compare options such as reprioritization, process improvement, automation, cross-training, vendor support, staffing, or service-level changes.
- Make the chosen capacity assumptions and tradeoffs explicit and define leading indicators that show the model is failing.
- Reforecast when demand mix, service expectations, or constraints change materially.
Decision rules
- Utilization near 100% leaves no recovery room for variable work.
- Headcount is not interchangeable when specialist capability is the bottleneck.
- This skill plans operational/team capacity; Fleet owns live compute/node capacity and placement.
- Do not hide backlog growth by redefining completion.
Quality gate
The plan is credible when demand, effective capacity, bottlenecks, variability, recovery margin, and assumptions are explicit; proposed changes address the actual constraint; and leading indicators show when capacity must be revisited.
