Placing work with Capacity

Capacity answers two questions that arrive together: how loaded am I, and who else has room. It has a tab for each.

My workload

Your own committed hours, week by week. A bar that overtops its line means you have been given more work than the week holds, not that you are behind.

Team availability

The firm-wide grid: who can do a kind of work, and who has room for it. Use it before assigning, rather than after somebody tells you they are full.

How hours are placed

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains figures that otherwise look wrong.

1. Orin starts at the due date

   Not at today. Work is placed backwards from when it is due, because that is the constraint that actually matters.

2. It walks backwards, filling working days

   Each day takes as many of the task's hours as that day has room for, then the previous day takes the rest.

3. Non-working days are skipped entirely

   Weekends, public holidays and any day your firm has marked closed take no hours at all. They are stepped over, not filled at a reduced rate.

Why a task can appear in a week before it was created

Because placement runs backwards from the due date. A task due Friday with sixteen hours on it lands on Thursday and Friday, whoever created it and whenever.

Dashed rows

A dashed row is an upcoming task: work Orin expects from a repeating service, which nobody has created yet. Solid rows are real, committed tasks. Forecasts tell you a week is already spoken for before the work formally exists.

Common questions

Somebody shows as free but tells me they are busy. Capacity only knows about work that has been recorded as tasks with hours. Work nobody has estimated is invisible to it.