In today’s fast-paced tech environment, launching new products and features is crucial for delivering customer value. However, a critical issue often overlooked until it’s too late is capacity management. This oversight can lead to oversubscribed teams, costly delays, and lower-quality launches.

By thoroughly considering and planning capacity not only at the start of a project but also at various checkpoints during implementation and go-to-market (GTM) phases, you can prevent bottlenecks and deliver successful launches.

What is capacity management? 

In this blog post, we define capacity management as the ongoing effort to estimate, plan, and continuously rebalance the resources required to complete a project. The more cross-functional a project is, the more crucial it becomes to perform this exercise, ensuring that all teams involved can contribute effectively.

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, in his book “How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects”, describes the goal of capacity management as:

“To make certain that the project has sufficient staff with the right skills, relevant experience, and enough availability required to carry out the project successfully. Project roles, responsibilities, and skills are the key elements to be considered. Surprisingly, many organizations launch projects without doing a capacity check before confirming the initiative.” 

Why is capacity management important? 

1. Avoid oversubscribed teams: shared resources, like designers, often become oversubscribed. When spread too thin, the quality of work on deliverables suffers, leading teams to ignore planned work. 
2. Ensure achievable OKRs: beyond just considering the potential impact, “effort” should be a key element of the prioritization framework. Understanding what can realistically be delivered helps align with planned OKRs. 
3. Gain leadership buy-in: confidence in your plan and deliverables enhances the credibility of your strategy, making it easier to secure the necessary buy-in from leadership.
4. Secure additional resources: by identifying oversubscribed teams early, you can quickly course-correct through prioritization or recruitment to meet your goals.  
5. Reduce delays and bottlenecks: when key resources are stretched too thin, critical tasks are delayed, creating bottlenecks that disrupt the entire project timeline.
6. Minimize missed opportunities: the ability to launch and iterate is crucial to creating impact and listening to users. Consistent delays undermine your ability to meet market demands, losing out to competitors, or missing critical deadlines.

How does Luna help with capacity management?  

• Visibility into resource allocation:  Luna provides launch level visibility into the participants, and their involvement across key milestones. Unlike tools that focus solely on development work, Luna offers insights into the entire lifecycle of a launch, considering contributions from various stakeholders such as design, marketing, and customer success. This high level view enables managers to quickly assess the workload of each team throughout the launch process. Often, it reveals that some engineering and design teams are oversubscribed, leading to potential delays and quality issues. With this visibility, managers can make informed decisions to reallocate resources, prevent oversubscription, and ensure that strategic goals are met. 

• Deep integration with Jira and other task management tools: Luna stays in sync with task management tools like Jira, offering real-time insights into resource allocation at various levels of work. By continuously tracking changes that occur throughout the project, Luna helps managers adjust resource distribution as needed, ensuring high quality project execution.

• Enhances cross-functional collaboration: Luna emphasizes milestones over individual tasks, bringing together all cross-functional teams involved in a project. This approach ensures that the capacity of all teams is accounted for and managed effectively by managers. Additionally, Luna's Milestone Center provides visibility into each team’s milestones across their project portfolio, allowing managers to anticipate peaks in workload and reallocate resources accordingly. 

Best practices and key components   

When conducting a capacity management exercise, consider the following key points:

• Account for non-project time: teams spend significant time on non-project activities like bug fixing, holidays, and other leaves. Additionally, people managers often dedicate more time to team management than direct project work. These factors should be factored into your capacity planning.
• Regular capacity reviews: monitor your overall portfolio capacity not only at the start of a project but also throughout the launch. Regular reviews help you avoid surprises and ensure high quality launches.
• Start with high level estimates of effort: begin with high level “t-shirt sizing”, reflecting the number of weeks of effort required. This approach provides a solid foundation for more detailed planning as the project progresses.
• Prioritize projects in alignment with resource allocation: at a basic level, stack rank your projects and assign them P0, P1, or P2 priority levels. Estimate the effort for each and adjust priorities to align with available resources.
• Communication and Transparency: managers of oversubscribed teams should openly communicate capacity issues. They should either push back on the plan or secure additional resources to ensure the planned impact is delivered.

Capacity management is crucial for avoiding predictable issues in your projects. Ignoring it can undermine the credibility of your OKRs and plans, leading to execution challenges, delays, and poor-quality launches. This is especially important for companies that prioritize timelines and need to manage expectations with public stakeholders. With proper planning and the right tools, capacity management becomes a straightforward and essential step in ensuring successful project outcomes.