When to use
Run this once a quarter, starting four weeks before the quarter begins, straight after the final portfolio prioritization. Rerun steps 3 to 6 mid-quarter if a project is added, stopped or loses people.
Roles
- Program Manager: leads. You build the capacity plan and make the staffing proposal.
- Product Owners of each Home Team: confirm team capacity, the Run allowance and the Discretionary share.
- Project Managers: review the proposed project team for their project and flag missing skills.
Before you start
- Get the ranked portfolio list with the projects that passed Gate 2, their T-shirt sizes and their affected Home Teams.
- Collect each Home Team's roster, planned leave and on-call rota for the quarter.
- Check Platform Health findings. A platform with open reliability problems may need a larger Run allowance.
Steps
- Count each Home Team's capacity. A quarter is 6 sprints, so a full team has 6 team-sprints. Reduce that for planned leave, holidays and new starters.
- Take out the Run allowance. Our default is 20% of each Home Team's capacity for Incident Management and Platform Health. Raise it for any platform with open reliability findings. Don't lower it below 10% without the Product Owner's agreement.
- Reserve the Discretionary share. Agree with each Home Team's Product Owner how much of the rest goes to their own backlog. Keep at least 1 team-sprint per Home Team, so small improvements don't stop.
- Offer the rest to projects. Go down the ranked list and assign capacity to each Gate 2 project, using the middle of its T-shirt range. Note which Home Teams each project draws on.
- Form project teams. For each project, propose named people from the affected Home Teams. Each project team needs a Product Owner and a Scrum Master, plus the skills the design calls for. Check each proposal with the Project Manager.
- Mark what doesn't fit. If a project can't be staffed, flag it as unstaffed. Don't spread people across more projects to make it fit.
- Publish the capacity plan to Project Managers, Product Owners and Product Managers so milestone planning can start.
Outputs
- A capacity plan per Home Team: total team-sprints, the Run allowance, the Discretionary share and the project allocation.
- A proposed roster for each project team.
- A list of unstaffed projects to raise at Quarterly Planning.
Pitfalls
- Planning to 100%. People also do support, training and hiring. The Run allowance covers Run work only.
- Splitting people across too many projects. Someone on three projects makes progress on none. Aim for one project per person, two at most.
- Quietly dropping the Run allowance. When incidents arrive, they take the time anyway, and the project plan slips without anyone deciding it should.