Capacity planning answers three questions continuously: who is free, when, and for how much of their week? For an IT services company it is the operational core — revenue is people × time × rate, and capacity planning manages the first two factors.
A workable capacity plan for a 5–200-person team needs:
- A per-person, per-project allocation view across the next 8–12 weeks — long enough to see roll-offs coming, short enough to stay honest.
- Time off folded in. A plan that ignores vacations overbooks exactly when it matters (summer, holidays).
- Over-booking flags. Someone at 120% across three projects is a delivery risk wearing the mask of great utilization.
- A bench view — free capacity is what you sell next.
The most common failure mode is planning in a spreadsheet that only one person understands and that dies the moment two projects change in the same week. The second most common is planning people at 100% billable with no allowance for meetings, estimates being wrong, or life.
See the full guide: Capacity planning for agencies and dev shops.
In Helia, the capacity matrix is edited inline (people × projects, percentages per cell) with a 12-week forecast and over-booking flags built in.