Three people can do the complex work. It’s 60% of the pipeline.

Headcount looks adequate and utilisation looks healthy, yet the schedule keeps slipping, because capacity was counted in hours rather than in the right kind of hours.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Three people can do the complex work. It’s 60% of the pipeline.

A firm of forty people has a pipeline weighted heavily toward its most sophisticated work. On paper there is plenty of capacity: utilisation sits in the low eighties, nobody is idle, and the headcount plan is on track. In practice the schedule slips, start dates drift, and the same three names appear on every difficult job. The business does not have a capacity problem. It has a concentration problem dressed up as a capacity problem, and the two behave very differently. Average utilisation hides the shape of the constraint Capacity…

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