Capacity planning without the argument

The problem

Deciding what a small team could take on kept turning into an argument about dates. Effort and timeline got conflated, so a long, low-intensity project looked as heavy as a short, all-hands one, and the real question, how loaded the team already is, went unanswered.

The idea

A project’s effort in person-days and its duration in weeks are independent, and their ratio is the load it puts on the team while it is active. Once you see that, load should always be derived, never typed in, and over-commitment becomes something you can watch happen.

What I built

• A four-step flow from sizing, to priority buckets, to a planning cockpit for the PM.
• A weekly resource grid and a month heatmap that flag the moment a team goes over capacity.
• A pure, tested scheduling engine with a conservation invariant, so the math cannot quietly cheat.

Impact

• Plans a small IT team of seven, replacing the recurring argument about dates with one shared picture.
• Cut decision fatigue and lifted throughput by making over-commitment visible before anyone commits.
• Load is always derived from effort and duration, never guessed, so the plan holds up.