How to Allocate Work Once You Know Capacity & Estimates

Now that we know how to measure capacity and estimate work, it's time to look at allocating that work to people so our projects can get accomplished.

As a refresher from the last two newsletters, our time scale for both capacity and estimates are half-day or third-day blocks rather than hours or some other arbitrary measure.

Let's see how this works by working through an example. To keep the maths easy, we're going to assume the following:

• We're using half day blocks (2 blocks per day)
• We've applied a discount of 10%, meaning each week has only 9 blocks of actual capacity

Quick aside: why 10%?

It roughly translates to the number of days available per week after removing 20 days of holidays and vacation time: (260 - 20) / 52 = 4.6 days per week

If your projects have higher variability or you're operating in a part of the world that has more vacation time, you'll likely want to apply a 20% discount factor and be happy when work is getting done faster than expected.

Back to our example: we know that everyone starts with a capacity of 9 blocks per week, and we need to make one last adjustment on a per person basis, as some of their capacity is already consumed by:

• Admin work like submitting expenses, booking travel, etc
• Managerial check ins like one on ones or cross-functional alignment meetings
• Recurring meetings for teams and projects that consume precious time (and in many cases could be done async or less frequently)

Given the average worker has 17 meetings per week, we'll be optimistic with our assumption that these are half hour meetings, so it's only consuming an entire day of capacity.

Now we know that everyone's available capacity is actually 7 blocks per week (although even this is probably inflated due to the insidious nature of recurring meetings).

Let's allocate work in a trickle down format:

1. Some work can only be done by one person due to relationships, skills, institutional knowledge, etc; thus, we allocate these first to start consuming available capacity
2. If the timeline is most important, allocate work that has the highest variance in its estimates (e.g. one person says a half-day, another says a full day) and assign it to the person that can do it most efficiently
3. If developing talent is most important, allocate work based on skill development needs to ensure that people are given an opportunity to establish competency

As you incorporate this into your planning, you're going to notice a few things:

1. People have way less capacity than you expect due to inefficiencies with admin tasks and how many meetings are scheduled (which in part creates a greater challenge, as it's harder to schedule non-recurring meetings)
2. High performers can easily be overcommitted or burned out if focusing solely on who can do the work most efficiently when allocating
3. Your timelines will expand as there is a cascading effect to not having sufficient capacity
4. Your portfolio will shrink as there are too many projects to deliver efficiently

All of these outcomes are expected when you shift to estimating and planning time with this methodology, and it's a positive thing if you can adjust expectations and shift to unlocking more available capacity.

TLDR: Allocating work starts with a person's actual capacity (e.g. 9 half-day blocks per week), removing their existing commitments (e.g. meetings, admin work), and then aligning estimated work with available capacity based on timeline and skills.