How capacity, time off, and work allocation are calculated

The high-level thinking

• We think of people’s time available as % of an employee’s total working time

• When people take Time Off, they won’t be doing any work

• If someone books a 100% time off allocation on top of an existing project allocation, the amount of work done for that time is not calculated. This is because the person doing the work is not able to deliver the work!

Why is it so?

• This method will give you a realistic capacity forecast, and not an overly optimistic one

Who is this good for

• Companies whose billing is tied to the amount of work being delivered

or

• who want to track budget overages or underutilization in relation to planned budgets

Who may disagree

• Retainer-based marketing agencies, where the contract defines “exactly this many hours (or days) per month” regardless of time off or changes in month’s available working days

  • We’d still argue, you still need to split the amount of work on the remaining days instead of having it overlap with time off!

• Very particular work patterns and detailed (task-by-task) scheduling: if you’re away every Monday and every other Wednesday and your colleague needs to know if you’re able to a piece of work on Wednesday afternoon three weeks from now, Operating is not going to be a great tool

  • In situations like this, we recommend:

    • Setting the individual working hours per week on average, e.g. 28h/week

    • Using Google Calendar or similar to share your availability on a very detailed level

    • When assigned to work, have the team coordinate who’s able to do what when

Example 1: planning the amount of work

Before you start the project, it is common to not know exactly who will be assigned to the team.

As you plan the amount of work, you have to assume how many days a person can do in the time that the project will take.

Then, if you assign people who don’t work exactly as much as you assumed, things start to get interesting:

When planning the project below with unnamed placeholders (e.g. Producer/Analyst/Copywriter, no person names yet), we calculate the amount of hours based on the Site default working hours (e.g. 40h/w for Toronto) —> These three blocks of work sum up to ~48 work days.

Now, we assigned Esbjörn to the Producer position: he only works 32h/week, and that’s instantly visible on the work effort – and you might also notice that the total work day counter changed to 43 days.

What is likely going to happen here is if the project requires closer to 50 work days of effort, having Anna and Esbjörn in the team is not ideal. However, if the project timeline can be a little bit longer, then simply stretch out the allocation blocks and end up with this:

Example 2: how much work does a person have?

Day-by-day visualisation on Timeline – case Anna

Continuing from example 1, let’s look at Anna on the People side of the Timeline.

What’s visible here:

• Confirmed 100% work from the beginning of February until the 21st

• Tentative 100% work from 17th of February through 18th of March – the project we planned in example 1

• Time off from 24th through 28th

A month summarised in Capacity – case Anna

When we look at her February in the Capacity report, this is what we see:

• 100% of her available time is booked to confirmed client work

  • The week of Time Off is not considered available, we assume she won’t be doing work when away

• 25% of her time is confirmed Time Off

• She also has 25% of tentative client work – the third week of February. Now, if this would be confirmed, she would be at 125% of capacity, probably very difficult to do the 200% of hours on that double-booked week.

  • The week of Time Off is not considered available, and the tentative booking overlapping with the holiday is ignored

Extreme Time Off behaviour – case Akira, time off

This is how less-than-100% time off (50% off on the third week of February) works:

The second week works just like Anna above – all of the work overlapping is ignored, Akira’s simply 100% away

The third week is different: as he’s 50% away, we don’t ignore the overlapping work, and calculate the third week to be 50+50+50 = 150% booked

• Here, stop to consider: is he really 50% away Monday through Friday? Or is he away Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday morning and back at work Thu-Fri? Would that make more sense, timeline-wise?

This is what Akira’s February looks like in the Capacity report:

This may feel counterintuitive at first, but this is how Operating thinks about it: Akira’s almost fully booked on average in February, landing at 88% – that’s true, because of the full week of time off and the 100% week of two project on week three, even if he has that 50% time off in there

Case Akira, time off adjusted

Here’s what happens if the week of 150% bookings is fixed: he is indeed away for the first half of the week, and the client projects are prioritised like this: he’s focusing his Wednesday afternoon on the OReilly project:

This is how these adjustments affect the Capacity report:

Case Akira, time off canceled

If we remove the holidays from the picture, here’s the Timeline:

And here’s the Capacity report:

This is a rather complicated topic and we’re always open for ideas and feedback at support@operating.app – thanks in advance!