Capacity provides an indication of how much work can be completed during your team’s sprint or Kanban interval. It incorporates the number of team members, issues (and their estimated size) that are assigned, along with the duration of the interval.

The success of a team and company is based on the value it delivers. Accurate, predictable planning of the amount of value that can be delivered with the team available increases your likelihood of success and overall impact. Using your data to know the capacity of each team provides the edge to accurate, predictable capacity planning.

Teams will always experience peaks and troughs that reflect the effort required to deliver a company's strategic milestones or annual cadence. A team knowing their capacity helps empower them to better manage their own workload and smooth out the peaks and troughs. Capacity supports a balanced approach to maintaining a sustained, consistent and repeatable amount of work. On the flip side, it also helps teams more accurately define an opportunity to take on additional work to fit any available capacity.

It’s equally important for leaders to know each team's unique baseline of how much work they can actually be assigned and completed based on their capacity due to the unique composition of skills and team members per team. Knowing this baseline enables leaders to plan an organisation’s capacity more accurately, along with building roadmaps that have a greater chance of success of completion rather than over or under-planning what can be delivered to customers by a specific date.

Your team’s context is always the best arbiter of what ‘good’ looks like.

As a general principle, ‘good’ capacity represents an assigned amount of work that has a high likelihood of completion given the available team members and the number of days in the interval. A good Capacity score in Umano is when the assigned and actual capacity meets or exceeds the predicted capacity of a team.

Umano Measures Capacity by observing:

Noting that:

When there is no time logged or story point estimation assigned, the Capacity score will be presented in days to accommodate for the fact that scores consider 24 hours per day and tickets, considering that the full ticket needed to be completed in the current sprint instead of a fraction.

Specifically, we define Planned and Predicted capacity in the following way:

Planned Capacity:

Amount of work (as Cycle Time or Story Points or Issues) assigned/added to the sprint/Kanban interval. This uses all the tickets added to the sprint whether it was there at the start of the sprint or added mid-sprint. If there are tickets inherited from a previous sprint, the amount of work assigned as the planned capacity is determined by the amount of work left to complete in those tickets (This is calculated using the usual amount of time spent on similar-sized tickets in the past by the team.)
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For example, if a team takes 5 days to complete a ticket that is sized 5 Story Points, and it has been in progress for 2 days in the previous sprint, planned capacity for the current sprint will only allocate 3 story points out of the 5SP of the ticket as the team has already spend 2/5th of time on the ticket in the previous sprint.

The amount of work that Umano predicts that the team might be able to complete during the sprint by looking at the past sprints.

Umano's chart plots your planned, actual and predicted capacity scores over time.

You can plot your capacity scores based on your actual cycle time, issues, or story points, depending on how you work and the insights you seek to generate.

For any chosen interval in the Chart, Umano surfaces all assigned issues for that interval, visualising the planned and unplanned capacity for that issue.

Capacity spent in prior sprints is represented in the progress bar through a faded shade of colour.

Capacity spent and available in the current sprint is represented in the progress bar through an intensified shade of colour.