--- title: "Capacity planning for engineering teams · DeliverySheet" description: "How to plan engineering capacity for a quarter in four steps: each team's real capacity in FTE-months, sizing work, and what to do with what does not fit." canonical_url: "https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/capacity-planning-for-engineering-teams" last_updated: 2026-10-09 meta: author: "Tan Gravam" "og:description": "How to plan engineering capacity for a quarter in four steps: each team's real capacity in FTE-months, sizing work, and what to do with what does not fit." "og:image": "https://www.deliverysheet.com/_og/s/o_99cad091ac405efd.png" "og:image:alt": "Capacity planning for engineering teams — DeliverySheet essay card" "og:image:height": "600" "og:image:type": image/png "og:image:width": "1200" "og:title": "Capacity planning for engineering teams — DeliverySheet" "twitter:description": "How to plan engineering capacity for a quarter in four steps: each team's real capacity in FTE-months, sizing work, and what to do with what does not fit." "twitter:image": "https://www.deliverysheet.com/_og/s/o_99cad091ac405efd.png" "twitter:image:alt": "Capacity planning for engineering teams — DeliverySheet essay card" "twitter:title": "Capacity planning for engineering teams — DeliverySheet" --- > Index of every page on this site: [llms.txt](https://www.deliverysheet.com/llms.txt) [← All writing](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog) # **Capacity planning for engineering teams** 7 August 2026 · 6 min read · by [Tan Gravam](https://www.deliverysheet.com/about) ## **How do you do capacity planning for engineering teams?** **The short answer ** Capacity planning for engineering teams, done at the commitment level, is four steps. Establish each team's honest capacity in FTE-months — headcount times months, minus support rotation, run-the-business work and realistic interruption. Size each demand per craft, with a confidence level attached to every figure, and send "cannot estimate yet" to a time-boxed discovery instead of a guess. Walk the demands down each team's line in priority order, subtracting as you go, and stop when the line is spent. Then deal honestly with the first demand past the line: park it with a review date, decline it with a reason, displace something visibly — or commit it early with a recorded exception. What you must not do is the thing most organisations do: round the line up until everything fits. [Capacity planning](https://www.deliverysheet.com/glossary/capacity-planning), at the level an engineering manager is accountable for, answers one question: *what can each team honestly promise this quarter?* Not how hours will be spent — that is timesheets, a different and mostly worthless exercise — and not how a sprint will be filled. What follows is the whole practice, end to end, in four steps. Tomas, who runs three teams at a logistics scale-up, will walk them with us. ## The unit: FTE-months, per team, per craft The unit is the [FTE-month](https://www.deliverysheet.com/glossary/fte-month) — one full-time person working for one month. It is coarse on purpose: comparable across teams, convertible into a cost forecast, and blunt enough that nobody pretends it is precise. It is recorded per team and per craft — backend, frontend, data — because "the team has capacity" is exactly the sentence that hides the fact that the one data engineer is the constraint on half the plan. ## Step one: how to calculate team capacity Gross capacity is headcount times months. Tomas's payments team of six has eighteen FTE-months in a quarter — and that number is the first lie to kill, because none of those six people has an empty quarter. Subtract what is already spoken for: the support rotation (two FTE-months), the platform upgrade nobody is allowed to skip (one and a half), holidays actually booked (one), and realistic interruption — incidents, reviews for other teams, the meetings that happen whether planned or not (two and a half; if you have no data, twenty per cent is a defensible opening claim). Payments' honest number is eleven. Planning against eighteen would not make the missing seven reappear; it would decide, in advance and in silence, that the quarter ends in overrun. **Honest capacity = people × months, minus support rotation, run-the-business work, booked holidays and an interruption reserve.** The same arithmetic as a table: | Payments team, one quarter | FTE-months | | --- | --- | | Gross (6 people × 3 months) | 18.0 | | Support rotation | −2.0 | | Platform upgrade | −1.5 | | Booked holidays | −1.0 | | Interruption reserve | −2.5 | | **Honest capacity** | **11.0** | If you want this walk as an artifact, [the one-sheet capacity planning template](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/capacity-planning-template) is these five columns and nothing else. ## Step two: size demands, with confidence attached Each candidate demand gets a per-craft figure with a confidence level from one to five. Four backend FTE-months at confidence five and the same figure at confidence two are different claims — the second says "nobody has looked at the migration yet" in a form that survives being written down. The figure comes from the delivering team, never from planning on their behalf; a capacity number produced *for* a team is a wish with units. Two honest special cases. "I cannot estimate this yet" is a legitimate answer, and it forks to a time-boxed discovery with an end date — not to a guess extracted under meeting pressure. And a low-confidence figure on a large demand is a prompt to shape further or hold reserve, not an invitation to argue the number down until it fits. ## Step three: walk the line In priority order, walk the demands down each team's number, subtracting per craft as you go. For payments: the retention work takes four backend, leaving seven; carrier invoicing takes three backend and one frontend, leaving four; the reconciliation rewrite wants five backend — and does not fit. Stop. That is the line, and it is per-team: an organisation-level total is meaningless, because FTE-months do not transfer between a data engineer and an iOS engineer at par. The demands above the line, once each team has agreed to its figures, are the quarter's commitments. Below the line does not mean "stretch goals" — stretch goals are commitments that have pre-arranged their excuse. If one team takes work from several product lines, the walk happens once for that team, down a single list ranked across all of them. Who owns that ranking, and a worked example, are in [capacity planning across several product lines](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/capacity-planning-across-product-lines). Platform team: 9.6 FTE-months this quarter433.5 the linePayments changeAudit loggingSingle sign-on7 of 9.6 spent, 2.6 left. The next one needs 3.5:cut it, swap it in, park it or decline it. In writing. *The same walk, drawn for a different team: a platform team with 9.6 FTE-months and three requests in priority order. The line is where the third one stops fitting.* ## Step four: the first demand past the line The reconciliation rewrite, sitting just past payments' line, is the entire point of the exercise — the demand every planning process is secretly designed to avoid looking at. There are exactly three honest things to do with it. Record a not-now: park it with a review date, or decline it with a reason its requester can read. Displace visibly: if it matters more than something above the line, that something moves down, on the record, and its stakeholder is told. Or commit it early anyway, because a real deadline outweighs the missing capacity — at the price of a recorded exception naming why it is early, what is missing, who accepts the risk, and what would change the decision. What is not on the list is the popular answer: "we'll try to fit it in." Trying to fit it in is a displacement performed silently, against a victim chosen later, discovered at quarter end. When the same team is the first line spent quarter after quarter, the record of what did not fit is [the case for headcount](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/justifying-engineering-headcount). ## During and after the quarter The line keeps working after planning ends. A mid-quarter urgent ask is an edit to a named commitment above the line, never an addition — capacity did not grow because a request arrived. And at quarter end, the closes come back to the number: Tomas closes payments' quarter, finds the team overran by two FTE-months, and resists the reflexive conclusion. The honest correction is usually not "estimate better" — it is a lower line or a bigger interruption reserve next quarter, because the closes are the only evidence about the honest number he will ever get. Capacity planned this way survives being looked at, because it measures what teams are committed to, never how individuals spent their hours. That distinction, and the rest of the capacity layer, is at [the capacity overview](https://www.deliverysheet.com/topics/capacity). Defined in the glossary: [Capacity planning](https://www.deliverysheet.com/glossary/capacity-planning), [Capacity line](https://www.deliverysheet.com/glossary/capacity-line) I'm Tan Gravam. I build **DeliverySheet** — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date. $189/month per workspace, unlimited members. 7-day free trial — card required, cancel before it ends and you're not charged. I answer the support email myself. [**Start 7-day trial **](https://www.deliverysheet.com/login?next=/app) [**See pricing **](https://www.deliverysheet.com/pricing) Not ready for that? Play [eight rounds of Request or topic?](https://www.deliverysheet.com/spot-the-request) It takes two minutes and needs no sign-up. ## **More on capacity and what to measure** [Read the overview: Capacity and what to measure →](https://www.deliverysheet.com/topics/capacity) - [Estimating capacity when you don't know enough yet](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/estimating-capacity-you-dont-have-yet) The honest answers to "how big is this?" are a range, a range with low confidence, and "I need to look first". - [Ten projects in flight is a queue pretending to be progress](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/too-many-projects-in-flight) Running everything in parallel feels like motion and delivers like a queue. What the in-flight count costs, and the sequencing that fixes it. - [Capacity planning when one team serves several product lines](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/capacity-planning-across-product-lines) Capacity planning for an engineering org with several product lines: plan the teams, rank across lines once per shared team. A worked example in FTE-months. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@id":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/#website","@type":"WebSite","description":"Turn raw work requests into structured, decision-ready demands before you commit people, budget, or a date. 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Establish each team's honest capacity in FTE-months — headcount times months, minus support rotation, run-the-business work and realistic interruption. Size each demand per craft, with a confidence level attached to every figure, and send \"cannot estimate yet\" to a time-boxed discovery instead of a guess. Walk the demands down each team's line in priority order, subtracting as you go, and stop when the line is spent. Then deal honestly with the first demand past the line: park it with a review date, decline it with a reason, displace something visibly — or commit it early with a recorded exception. What you must not do is the thing most organisations do: round the line up until everything fits."}},{"@id":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/about#person","@type":"Person","jobTitle":"Founder","name":"Tan Gravam","url":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/about","sameAs":["https://gravam.com","https://twitter.com/TanGravam","https://github.com/TanGravam"]},{"@id":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/#logo","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"DeliverySheet","contentUrl":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/logo.png","inLanguage":"en","url":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/logo.png"},{"@id":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/#/schema/image/1","@type":"ImageObject","contentUrl":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/_og/s/o_99cad091ac405efd.png","inLanguage":"en","url":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/_og/s/o_99cad091ac405efd.png"}]} ``` ## Sitemap See the full [sitemap](https://www.deliverysheet.com/sitemap.md) for all pages.