By Maria Mothibeli, Head of Operations: SPM
At some point in project planning, the schedule can look better than the reality behind it. Every team is allocated, the work has a date, and the available weeks are filled. The assumption is that if the work fits into the schedule, the business has the capacity to deliver it. Operations has to test that assumption because what fits on a schedule and what can realistically be delivered are not always the same thing.
Capacity is often discussed in terms of numbers: the number of people available, the hours they can work and the projects that can be fitted into a given period. Those numbers are useful, but they can create a false sense of certainty. In an engineering business, ten available employees do not necessarily give you ten people who can be allocated to any ten vacancies on a project. Work may require particular technical experience or authorisation, while some people cannot be moved without disrupting work already underway. Others may be available according to the schedule but still be needed to close out a previous project.
Equipment creates similar constraints. A team can be ready, and a client can be expecting them, but the equipment required for the work may still be committed elsewhere. Site access may have moved, a preceding activity may not have been completed, or the outage window the programme was built on may have changed. None of these circumstances necessarily creates an empty block on a planning sheet, but each affects whether the work can proceed as planned.
The difficulty increases when several projects run at once because Operations does not manage each schedule in isolation. A delay on one project can affect the people or equipment allocated to the next one, which can then affect another commitment further down the line. A schedule can therefore remain technically correct even when the assumptions on which it was built are no longer realistic.
Consider a specialist who is due to finish on one site on Friday and begin on another on Monday. The second project has been planned on the basis that the person will be available. If the first job runs three days late, the problem is no longer confined to the first job because the business has already committed that capacity somewhere else. Finding another person may solve the problem, but that is not always possible when the work requires particular experience, project knowledge, or an authorisation that cannot simply be substituted at short notice.
A similar problem occurs when unused time is treated as spare capacity. A gap between two projects may appear to be an opportunity to add work, but that decision must take into account what sits on either side of the gap. The project before it may overrun, resources may need time to move between sites, or work that could not have been anticipated when the schedule was drawn up may require attention.
This is also why some room for movement matters in an operating plan. It does not mean keeping teams idle in anticipation of problems. It means recognising that a plan built on every person, every piece of equipment and every available hour being used exactly as expected has very little tolerance for the normal variation that comes with project work.
Site conditions change, clients move dates, and work uncovers problems that were not visible at the planning stage. An activity expected to take a day may take two. These are ordinary realities of execution, and the real test of the operating plan is whether it can accommodate them without one change setting off a chain of broken commitments elsewhere.
Capacity must therefore be considered before new work becomes a firm commitment. When assessing an opportunity, the question cannot be only whether there is somewhere to put it on the schedule. The business also needs to understand what has already been promised, which people and equipment those promises depend on, and how much flexibility remains if existing projects move.
Sometimes that assessment produces an uncomfortable answer. A business may have people who look available but not the particular capability the project requires. There may be space in the programme but no practical way to deploy the necessary equipment. There may even be an opportunity worth pursuing that cannot be accepted on the proposed date without pressuring existing commitments. Recognising those constraints early gives the business an opportunity to change the timing or the way the work is resourced before a capacity problem becomes a delivery problem.
The schedule remains essential because it lets Operations coordinate work, allocate resources, and give clients dates they can plan around. But it is still a plan based on what we currently expect to happen, and project work rarely follows every assumption exactly. A realistic view of capacity has to go further by asking whether the business still has enough room to deliver its commitments when those assumptions inevitably change.