Obsessing Over Capacity

Project planning can be rough sometimes. Let's say your client agrees to a creative idea on Friday evening, and then wants you to let them know when you can deliver it and commit to a contract by Tuesday. Can't predict the future? Tough luck. A new website and rebrand in 4 weeks? Sure, sign here.

Understanding your team's capacity to deliver work is one of the most important, and gravely underutilized metrics when it comes to successful project planning. Every time you start a new project, there's an inherent risk it'll fail. If money isn't lost, it's often at the expense of time and morale. The client-service world is full of surprises once you start a project (e.g., when you realize that API they asked you to integrate with is not really an API at all, or those image assets they promised you were really low-res JPGs, not layered Photoshop files.) The list goes on.

Planning is about reducing the risk of failure. That's why we care so much about capacity at Float.

Scheduling a proposed project needs to account for real team availability. A Gantt chart that doesn't account for capacity is a chart with only the best intentions. It must be clear when your team is free to take on new work, what projects are competing for their attention, and when they have planned time off. These are all factors that influence their capacity and your ability to deliver a new project. In the early 1900's, Henry Gantt himself produced "Man Record Charts" to track team-based capacity utilization. Gantt charts may have become his namesake, but they were never his only planning tool.

Today, we launched a feature enabling you to import public holidays based on your team’s local region. If you have a remote worker based in Melbourne, Australia, you can import the public holidays for Victoria and block them out in their schedule. Regardless of where your team is located, you can select their local holidays and have those days automatically populate. Learn more about how it works here.

It's not one of our biggest or most complex features, but it is one of our most important. It's the last in a long series of features we've been working on since 2012, to provide our customers with the most accurate view of their team's capacity.

Designing the most accurate view of team capacity has been our Holy Grail. Today, we believe Float delivers the most accurate view of any team's capacity. If capacity planning isn't front and center in your next project planning process, give Float a try. It's free for 30 days.