Available Capacity
The starting point is contractual working hours (accounting for statutory limits under the Working Time Regulations 1998, such as the 48-hour average working week), reduced by planned statutory annual leave (minimum 5.6 weeks / 28 days for full-time staff), bank and public holidays, an empirical factor for sickness and Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) absence, training, and the non-project-related portion of the role. What remains is plannable net capacity — regularly significantly less than the nominal weekly working hours would suggest.
Deriving Demand
Demand is derived from the estimated remaining effort of ongoing projects and the weighted effort of proposals in the sales pipeline. Weighting according to deal probability prevents every quote from appearing as a guaranteed workload.
Identifying Bottlenecks
Overall team utilisation is less informative than capacity utilisation per skill set or qualification. A team may have net availability in aggregate and yet be completely blocked if the only person with a specific expertise is overbooked. Planning should therefore always take place at the role or skill level.
Historical Data as a Corrective Measure
Estimates are systematically overoptimistic. Benchmarking against actual logged hours from comparable, completed projects provides a correction factor that quickly makes capacity planning far more reliable than any refinement of estimation methodology alone.
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