Capacity Planning
With a large organization, you can't walk each PM through a quarter's prioritization tradeoffs. Use capacity planning to do this with many PMs at once.
Context
PMs are each struggling to prioritize their work. Last quarter's plan was hopelessly overloaded, and in spite of clear instructions, PMs continue to overload their teams. Team performance is slowing. There are many competing goals and the PMs have varying skillsets and ability to cope with the environment.
In a perfect world...
the goals are clear and PMs understand the strategic context. they seamlessly make all their own prioritization tradeoffs, matching the demand to the capacity they have, and communicating compassionately and confidently with stakeholders.
In the real world, they need some help.
At EPI, we have a big team (15+ PMs) with a wide range of skill levels. Although I love coaching PMs 1:1, I simply don't have time to sit with each of them and guide them through each of their prioritization tradeoffs, and we don't yet have a layer of directors who can take care of this.
So we needed an approach that allowed us to work across a large and unwieldy group of teams.
I learned this play from Chris Matts, who wrote Capacity Planning as a Work-In-Progress Andon Cord, and you should read his version if you're trying this. But we've been using it at EPI for about 4 quarters now, and we've learned a few things too.
Play
Formally compare the demand to the available capacity for each team for the coming quarter. Then explicitly descope investments that don't fit.
Chris has some nice, concise steps in his article that I'll quote directly here:
- List the candidate investments for the next quarter. Ensure that they are end to end investments that deliver value to a customer (internal or external).
- Identify all teams required to deliver the investment. (Do not forget legal, training, business change, operations etc.). Place an “X” against each team.
- Get each team to provide a SWAG estimate (Sweet Wild Asses Guess) in team weeks. SWAGs should take a few minutes to determine AT MOST.
- Calculate the capacity of each team (Number of teams * Number of weeks in period * Capacity Adjustment * [100% – PercentageOfBusinessAsUsual])
- Calculate demand on each team by summing all the SWAGs from Step 3 that are in scope
- Compare demand with capacity (Over/Under).
- Bring all stakeholders together to agree which items will be descoped from the next period.
- Descope items until the demand is less than or equal to the capacity FOR ALL TEAMS!
- Publish organisation wide backlog for the next period.
- When stakeholders want to add items to the backlog, use the capacity plan to identify which items will not be delivered as a result.
- At the end of the period, review the order in which items are delivered.
In practice, what this looks like for us at EPI is the following: