Capacity planning

Capacity planning for small teams, without a spreadsheet that breaks.

Capacity planning for a small team is working out how much the people you actually have can realistically finish in a given window — and deciding what not to commit to before you say yes. For a team of two to ten, it isn't a forecasting model or a resource-management suite. It's an honest, shared picture of who has room and who's already full once you subtract time off and a buffer for the work that always shows up mid-week. All Do is a free, web-based planner built for exactly that — one swimlane per teammate, drag-and-drop tasks, PTO that splits across deadlines, and a capacity band that flags an overloaded week at a glance.

What capacity planning actually means under ten people

On a big organization, capacity planning is a discipline with its own software: demand forecasts, utilization targets, a resource manager who allocates people across a portfolio. On a team of six, it's a much smaller and more human question, asked roughly once per planning cycle: given who we have and what's already on their plates, what can we honestly take on next?

The answer has two halves. The first is supply — how many real working days each person has in the window, after holidays, recurring meetings, and the part of the week that never goes to planned work. The second is demand — the things you're being asked to ship, sized well enough to compare against that supply. Capacity planning is just holding those two next to each other and being honest when demand is bigger than supply.

Why most capacity-planning advice doesn't fit a small team

Search the term and you'll find enterprise playbooks: lead, lag, and match strategies; utilization dashboards; quarterly demand modeling. The ideas aren't wrong, they're just sized for a department of fifty. Two pieces survive the trip down to a small team, and they're the only two you need to internalize.

Plan to 70–85%, never 100%

Nobody on a real team spends every working hour on planned tasks. Reviews, a teammate's quick question, the bug that appears on Tuesday, the all-hands — it adds up to roughly a fifth of the week before anyone touches a roadmap item. Plan each person to about 70–85% of their nominal time and your estimates have somewhere to breathe. Plan to 100% and the first interruption makes every downstream date a lie.

Match commitments to real capacity, not optimistic capacity

The "match" idea from the big playbooks survives as a sentence: commit to the capacity you actually have this window, not the capacity you'd have in a perfect one. A week with two people on holiday is a smaller week. Pretending otherwise is how a plan looks great on Monday and falls apart by Thursday.

The five inputs a small team actually needs

You can do honest capacity planning with five things and nothing more:

• People — who's on the team and roughly what each one does.
• Real availability — working days in the window minus PTO, holidays, and known meeting load.
• Task sizes — rough durations, not story points. "About three days" is enough to plan with.
• A buffer — the 70–85% rule, applied so you don't fill the last fifth of everyone's week.
• Priorities — an ordered list, so when demand beats supply you cut from the bottom instead of squeezing everyone.

Notice what's not on the list: velocity charts, utilization reports, capacity-modeling formulas. A team of six doesn't need to predict the future. It needs to see the present clearly enough to say a confident no.

Why the spreadsheet breaks

Most small teams start in a spreadsheet, and for a while it's fine. Then it isn't. The failure is rarely dramatic — it's quiet. Someone reorganizes the columns to fit a new project. The PTO tab falls a week out of date. A formula that split holidays across deadlines silently returns the wrong number, and nobody notices until a launch is already late. The moment the sheet stops matching reality, people stop trusting it, and an untrusted plan is worse than no plan because it still looks authoritative in the meeting.

The deeper problem is that a spreadsheet stores capacity as numbers in cells, divorced from time. You can't see that Diego is double-booked in the third week of the quarter; you have to compute it. Capacity is a picture, and a grid of numbers is the wrong shape for it.

How All Do does capacity planning

All Do treats capacity as something you look at, not something you calculate. The whole board is one timeline with a swimlane per teammate, switchable between week, month, and quarter. Each person's tasks are drag-and-drop bars on their row, so a glance down a single week tells you who's stacked three deep and who's open.

Concretely:

• Capacity bands — a small green / amber / red strip under each week turns amber and then red as a person's load climbs past what the week can hold. Over-allocation is a color, not a calculation.
• PTO that splits tasks — record someone's holiday once and every task crossing it shortens its available days automatically, so the plan reflects the smaller week without you doing the math.
• Drag to rebalance — when a week goes red, drag a task onto a teammate with room and the picture rebalances live. No re-keying a spreadsheet.
• Quarter view — zoom out to see whether the next thirteen weeks are achievable before you promise them to anyone.
• Read-only sharing — hand a clean, anonymized link to a director so the capacity conversation happens over the same picture you're planning against.
• Free, no card — sign in with Google and you're planning; there's no seat math to do before you can try it.

A 60-second start

Open alldo.app, sign in with Google, and you land inside a sample board with a few teammates and tasks already in place. Add your real people, drop in the work you're being asked to commit to with rough durations, and mark any known time off. The capacity bands will tell you immediately whether the window is honest. If a week is red, drag something to a lighter lane or push it to the next window — and now you have a plan you can defend, not just a hopeful one.

When you don't need this

To save you the trial:

• You're a team of one or two on a single project — a shared note is genuinely enough; you don't need swimlanes.
• You bill by the hour and need timesheets — All Do plans capacity, it doesn't track logged time.
• You're allocating fifty-plus people across a portfolio — that's resource-management-suite territory, and the per-person swimlane stops scaling around ten.
• Your spreadsheet is genuinely current and trusted — if it matches reality and the team reads it, keep it. The point is an honest shared view, not a particular tool.

Frequently asked questions