In most agencies, people work on several projects at once. Each project lead sees their own plan and reasonably assumes the people on it are available. Nobody sees the whole week of the designer who is on four projects, until two deadlines land on the same day.
Resource planning is the practice of looking across projects at each person’s week. It does not need a dedicated department or a complex forecast. It needs a shared view of who is assigned to what, an honest estimate of the work and a regular moment to make trade-offs. This guide describes a lightweight version that works for most agencies.
The useful idea
Capacity planning is a weekly conversation about who has too much and what moves. A utilisation figure can start that conversation; it should not replace it.
Look at people, not only projects
Project plans answer ‘is this project on track?’. Capacity planning answers ‘can this person do everything we have asked of them this week?’. You need both views, and they should come from the same assignments so they never disagree.
Start with the assigned work for each person over the next two weeks, across every project. Include internal work, sales support and time off. A week that looks light on client work may already be full of things nobody wrote down.
Make estimates good enough, not perfect
Capacity planning depends on estimates, and estimates are often wrong. Do not let that stop you. A rough estimate per task, reviewed weekly, reveals overload far earlier than no estimate at all.
Ask the person doing the work to estimate it. Record the estimate in hours or simple sizes, and compare with what actually happened after a few weeks. Teams that review their estimates improve them; teams that never look stay surprised.
Treat utilisation as a conversation
Utilisation, the share of available time spent on billable work, is a common agency measure. It is useful for spotting patterns: a person who is always above their available hours, or a team that is rarely on client work. It is less useful as a target to hit every week.
Setting a high utilisation target can push people to hide internal work or overbook themselves. Use the figure to ask questions. Why is this person over? What could move? Is the estimate wrong, or the scope?
| Signal | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| Someone consistently over their hours | What can move to someone else or to next week? |
| Someone consistently under | Is work unassigned, or are estimates too high? |
| A project needing one specific person | Can we reduce that dependency? |
| Frequent last-minute reassignments | Are we planning far enough ahead? |
Run a short weekly capacity review
Once a week, look at the next two weeks for every person. Spend the time on people who are over or under, not on everyone. For each overloaded person, decide what moves: a task to someone else, a date to later, or a scope conversation with a client.
Invite the people who can make those trade-offs, usually project leads and whoever owns resourcing. Keep it short. The output is a list of moves with owners, not a discussion of every project.
- Who is over their available hours in the next two weeks?
- Which work could move, and to whom?
- Which client commitments are affected?
- Who tells the client, and by when?
Check capacity before you say yes
The best time to solve an overload is before the work is sold. When a proposal is close, ask who would deliver it and whether their weeks can absorb it. If not, you can adjust the start date or plan to bring in help before you commit.
Share pipeline information with whoever owns resourcing. A deal likely to close next month is a capacity question this month.
Plan for skills, not just hours
A team can have spare hours and still be short of the right person. If only one developer knows a client’s system, every request for that client queues behind them, however light everyone else’s week looks. Capacity planning should show these single points of dependency.
Note the skills each project needs and who can supply them. Where one person is the only option for several clients, plan deliberately: pair someone with them on the next project, document the system or adjust timelines so that person is not the bottleneck every week.
Leave room for the unplanned
Client work always brings unplanned requests: an urgent fix, a pitch, a call that needs preparation. If every hour of every week is assigned, the first unplanned request pushes something else late. Plan each person’s week below their full available hours and treat the gap as working space rather than waste.
Track how much unplanned work arrives over a few weeks. If it is consistently large, that is information about how you scope and sell, and it may justify a retainer conversation with the clients who generate it.
- Plan below full availability for each person.
- Record unplanned work so you can see its pattern.
- Protect time for internal work and learning.
Where Tamaam helps
Tamaam shows the team’s week across projects from the same tasks the projects use, and on the Agency plan offers capacity ahead with Nefer’s suggestions to rebalance for a person to approve. It is in early access; the review below works with any tool or a spreadsheet.
Weekly capacity review
Fill this before the review and record the moves agreed.
WEEKLY CAPACITY REVIEW Weeks covered: [dates] Over capacity: [person / assigned hours / available hours] Under capacity: [person / assigned hours / available hours] Time off and internal work: [person / dates] Proposed moves: [task / from / to / new date] Client commitments affected: [client / commitment / who tells them / by when] Pipeline that needs capacity: [deal / likely start / people needed] Estimates to revisit: [task / estimate / actual] Decisions recorded by: [name]
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