Bite size design operations | Capacity planning
If you drop by to read this post, I highly recommend to check out my previous post on Design Sizing to better understand the capacity planning. Because if you don’t properly measure the size of your work, how could you know whether you have the capacity to work on it or not?
Let’s demystify the capacity planning process!
Capacity planning changes according to the assumptions you make and dependencies you define. Therefore, after having an estimation of the size of your work, you need to make assumptions to understand how much a team or a designer can take on at any given time.
When you do your planning, either working individually or partnering up with your design manager, think about how many parallel projects a designer can work on depending on the team structure, and then translate that assumption to the points using the design sizing framework ^^. It’s time to move away from the traditional effort-based design sizing to a slightly more complicated one BECAUSE “this is the way!”
Here’s the assumptions I used in my model:
1- Assume X% capacity: As designers have other goals than product goals that fall under organizational and professional development, you need to consider the time they can work on product specific goals. Let’s say it 60%, meaning over 6 months, your team would be able to spend roughly 14 weeks on product goals.
2- Using the design sizing model, it’s time to decide on translating the number of parallel projects a designer can take on to the points a designer can take on. Let’s say a designer can work on 3 parallel projects. If a Large project is the one takes 12 weeks to deliver, and it’s equal to 4 points then the max number of points a designer can take on would be 4X3 = 12 points!
So let’s look at what we’ve so far: we know the goals we’ll be working on in 6 months, we know the design size of each goal in points, and we know the individual capacity in points. THAT’S IT! The rest is a simple math problem.
For example, you have 10 goals to work on in 6 months and you have 2 designers in your team. The capacity for the team over 6 months is 24 points. Let’s say each goal size varies from 2–4 points with an average of 2.3. As there are 10 goals in your portfolio and the average size is 2.3 then the workload is 10X2.3 = 23 points. AND you have a capacity of 24 points, it’s almost clear that your team would be able to deliver!
The next step from this point would be communicating your capacity with your stakeholders, deciding on the sequence and keeping a close eye on your workload by regularly checking-in with your team!
