Why MSP capacity is hard to plan
At most MSPs the same engineers deliver projects and work tickets. Ticket load is real but unscheduled, so a project plan that ignores it books people into hours the queue already uses. The project slips, or the queue backs up, and usually both.
Spreadsheet capacity plans try to fix this and go stale, because the inputs live elsewhere: leave in one place, ticket time in Autotask, project estimates in the project plan. Somebody has to pull them together every week, and by Thursday the sheet is wrong.
How ProjectSmith works out capacity
Capacity is each person’s weekly hours, spread over Monday to Friday, less approved leave and their region’s public holidays. A half day of leave takes half a day. Leave still awaiting approval does not reduce capacity.
Load is the total of three things. Project work: for each project, the larger of the hours booked, the remaining estimate of the person’s scheduled tasks, and the time they have had approved, so a booking and the estimate for the same work are never added together. Reserved hours: time set aside for the service desk rota, pre-sales or training. And service-desk load: ticket work from Autotask.
The grid shows one row per person and one column per week, for 4, 8, 12 or 26 weeks. A week at 85% or more turns amber; over capacity turns red. Hover over a cell for the breakdown of what reduced the capacity and what makes up the load.
Booking people on projects
A Planner opens a person’s row and types hours into a week against a project. Filter the grid to one project to plan its team: each cell then shows that project’s hours, while the colour still reflects the person’s whole load, so someone already full on other work still shows red.
Bookings and reserved hours live only in ProjectSmith. Autotask has no equivalent, so nothing is written to Autotask when you book someone.
Everyone is on the grid
Every Autotask resource appears in capacity planning, whether or not they hold a ProjectSmith seat. You pay for the people who use the tool and plan for everyone, including the service-desk techs who never open it.
The same numbers feed utilisation reporting: ticket hours plus billable project hours against capacity, by day, week or month. See the features page for how utilisation is counted.
Making it a weekly habit
A capacity grid is only as good as the meeting that uses it. Thirty minutes a week, with the service delivery manager, the project managers and the service desk lead, covers the next two weeks in detail and the next eight in outline. Our article on running a weekly capacity meeting sets out an agenda that works for a team of around fifteen.