Glossary
What is capacity planning?
Establishing what each team can honestly promise for a period — gross FTE-months minus what is already spoken for — and committing demands against that line in priority order.
The two failures are planning against a gross number (holidays, support rotations and interruptions are not available capacity) and planning against an organisational total (capacity is per team; a spare month of mobile capacity does not build a backend service). The plan holds when each team's line is real and the demands walked down it stop at the line.
Related terms
- FTE-month — One full-time person working for one month — a capacity unit that is comparable across teams and, where cost is recorded, is the multiplier a cost forecast would use.
- Allocation vs consumption — Allocation is what people are committed to; consumption is what they spent. Delivery governance measures allocation and deliberately does not measure consumption.
- Capacity line — A team's honestly available capacity for a period, stated in FTE-months — the constraint that commitments are walked down against, in priority order, until it is spent.
This definition comes from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.