A capacity planning template that fits on one sheet

I ran versions of this template for years, in spreadsheets, and it genuinely works — for a while. Here it is in full: five columns per team, one sheet per quarter. After the template, the two failures that eventually found every version of it, because they are not fixable with columns.

The template: five columns per team

The unit is the FTE-month, per team and per craft — never an organisational total, because a spare month of mobile capacity does not build a backend service, and the blended number hides exactly the constraint that will bite.

Three rules that keep the sheet honest

The delivering team gives every figure. A capacity number produced for a team is a wish with units, and the gap between the wish and the team's own number is precisely the amount by which the quarter will slip.

Confidence rides along. "4 backend, low confidence" and "4 backend, high confidence" are different claims; collapsing them throws away the more important half. Low confidence on a large demand forks to a time-boxed discovery, not to a number argued down until it fits.

The walk stops at the line. The first demand past it gets an honest exit — parked, declined, or something above it visibly displaced. What it must not get is "we'll try to fit it in", which is a displacement performed silently against a victim chosen later.

The two failures no template fixes

A sheet cannot refuse. When the line is spent and the eleventh demand arrives with a vice-president behind it, the sheet offers no resistance — a cell is edited, the line moves, and the sheet records the new fiction as neatly as it recorded the old truth. The constraint held for exactly as long as nobody important pushed on it, which means it was never a constraint; it was a diagram of one.

A sheet cannot remember who accepted the risk. Someone did commit past the line — someone always does, sometimes for genuinely good reasons. Twelve weeks later, the overrun arrives and the sheet shows only the final state: no record of why the early commitment was made, what was known to be missing, or who accepted it. The number you need at quarter end — how many misses were early commitments — cannot be reconstructed from a grid of edited cells.

Both failures have the same shape: the sheet holds arithmetic, and the thing that breaks is a record of decisions. Columns cannot fix it, because under pressure whoever bends the plan also edits the columns. Where the sheet genuinely wins, and where it quietly fails, is its own honest page.

Use the template anyway

If you plan against gross capacity today, this sheet is a large upgrade and costs an afternoon. The arithmetic is real, the walk is real, and the full practice around it — sizing with confidence, the first demand past the line, what to do at quarter end — works on paper exactly as described. When the two unfixable failures start to cost you — the third silently bent line, the first quarter-end where nobody can say who accepted which risk — that is the honest trigger for moving the decisions somewhere that holds them. DeliverySheet is that record: every commitment carries the per-team capacity figures the delivering teams gave, the committed-capacity report sums them per team so the walk has arithmetic nobody can quietly edit, and committing before the evidence is ready takes a recorded, named exception. The sheet keeps the arithmetic. The record keeps the promises.