Services Capacity Management – Part 1 - Components

For small teams, Capacity Planning can be a “nice to have”.  With <10 active Implementations or Live Customers, a dedicated Manager can typically coordinate a moderately sized team and anticipate new launches with minimal (conscious) effort put into forecasting and hiring planning.

However, Services Teams can quickly become overwhelmed and inefficient when an “at capacity” team is forced to absorb even 20% more customers with aggressive launch deadlines.

Effective Capacity Planning goes beyond basic project planning and execution within the Services Team.  It requires accurate, realistic and bi-directional engagement with Sales and a full understanding of costs and hiring timelines.  Also, scalable models leverage a baseline level of “meta data” that describe the basic assumptions of repeatable projects/implementations

This article will provide an overview of the key components of Capacity Planning for a Service Operations business.  Part 2 will provide insight into how to build a scalable model and Part 3 will speak to ongoing operations/management.

Model Components:

• Team Staffing - A complete list of all available customer-facing “team members” (including employee and contractors) including their desired workload (which can vary fluctuate over time periods).

• Projects - A complete list of existing projects (including revenue generating and pro-bono) that require current (or near future) staffing.    Projects components include:

  • Client/Customer

  • Product

  • Status (Sales, Implementation, Support, Canceled)

  • Type (Implementation, Strategy

  • Staffing Level (Low, Medium, High, Very High)

  • Start Date (i.e. Kick-Off)

  • End Date (i.e. Launch date)

• Sales Opportunities - A complete list of Sales Opportunities that have AT LEAST reached the “Scoping” Stage (typically 50% probability of signature).  Opportunities will typically leverage the same data attribute as Projects with the following additional attributes:

  • Sales Phase (Initial Meetings -> Scoped -> Contracting -> Active)

  • Probability (based on Sales Phase)

• Team Skills (Advanced) – In most cases, Skills can be simplified by defining a Team Members “Product” expertise and general “Proficiency” within that product.  However, advanced teams may include Industry (i.e. Finance, PeopleOps), Function (Design, Implementation, Training, etc.) and Project Management (Scheduling, Issue Management, etc.)

Configuration Data:

For scale and efficiency, it is valuable to “pre-configure” certain concepts with standardized assumptions.    The following represent common dimensions for this configuration:

• Opportunity Structure - Based on Sales Phase, map to an estimated probability for the deal signing.   This estimate will inform/scale the “staffing level” of the project.  (I.e. projects with 50% likelihood will project 50% level of starring vs. signed projects).

• Project Structure - Projects are defined to have a structure and based on Staffing Level have approximate staffing needs. 

  • Implementation:  Sales -> Start-Up -> Support -> Canceled

  • Strategy:  Delivery

  • Strategy Staffing:  Delivery

Transactional Data:

The “heart” of the Capacity Model is accurately tracking the current staffing assignments which can vary across projects and project phase.

• Team Staffing Assignment - Each Team Member can be assigned to one or more CLIENTS for variable durations (i.e. 3/1 to 6/30) and staffing Levels (i.e. 20%).   The model can accommodate different staffing levels on SAME projects with multiple Team Members.

The above information will likely be available in a variety of sources, from existing tracking systems to Excel or Google Sheet.  

The next session will speak to how to how codify these into a simple working model that leverage only basic spreadsheet technology.