Capacity: 35 hours a week is not every week
A workload plan compares workload with capacity. If that capacity is the same every week, it ignores leave, training and part-time work, and overloads go unnoticed.
planned workload 32 h capacity
With a fixed 35 h capacity: no alert
In many workload plans, capacity is a straight line: 35 hours per person, every week. It is simple, and it is wrong one week in three.
A typical situation
Nora, in an engineering team, has 32 hours of work planned every week for a month. With a fixed 35-hour capacity, all is well. But in week 48, she has taken Friday off. In week 49, she attends a one-day training course. Her real capacity drops to 28 hours in those two weeks.
The 32 planned hours then exceed her capacity by 4 hours, two weeks in a row. With a straight line at 35 hours, the workload plan shows nothing.
What makes capacity vary
- leave and days off in lieu;
- training, trade fairs, travel;
- part-time work, which does not always fall on the same day;
- public holidays, which differ from one country to another.
Capacity is kept up to date like everything else
This is not about planning everything a year ahead. Known absences just need to be entered where workload is calculated, not in a separate spreadsheet. The week's capacity then becomes the real reference, and overload appears as soon as the absence is entered.
Key points
- a fixed capacity hides the overloads of short weeks;
- leave, training and part-time work are entered alongside the workload;
- the gap shows as soon as the absence is known, not the day before.