Case Study · Team Capacity
Building Visibility Into Team Capacity
I built a capacity reporting system that helped a services business understand where its team’s time was going and make more informed decisions about staffing, client scopes, and incoming work.
The challenge
Team members were reporting that they were overwhelmed, but leadership lacked a reliable view of hours worked across clients and projects. That made it difficult to identify where support was needed, justify specific hires, or assess whether client work matched the resources allocated to it.
What I built
I designed and introduced a weekly reporting process using a Google Form and a central spreadsheet. It began with hours by person and client, then expanded to individual projects and time off.
The reporting brought together what we had scoped, what we had forecast, and what people actually reported working. Comparing them helped us identify where an account was demanding more time than expected and investigate why.
Adoption depended on trust. I explained how the information would help us secure support and balance workloads. Within roughly three weeks, the process had become part of the team’s weekly routine.
As reporting needs grew, manual spreadsheet preparation limited how often we could review the information. I built a web app that used the existing form submissions and let stakeholders explore capacity by person, client, and function. Employees kept the same reporting process, while leaders could see updated actuals as submissions came in.
What changed
The system supported decisions to hire three new team members to relieve an overloaded team. We also reassigned work to people with available capacity and better-matched skills.
I used available resource allocations and historical benchmarks to create at least five new pipeline proposals, grounding our estimates in what the team could realistically deliver.
Project reporting exposed work that had exceeded its retainer allocation, giving us evidence for reviewing scope and improving future estimates. The reporting process also saved an estimated 10–20 hours per month in data preparation and analysis.
Leadership gained a shared basis for understanding current commitments, evaluating incoming work, and identifying the staffing each required.