Capacity planner
What your team can actually commit to this sprint, and which tickets fit inside it. You paste the team, it drafts the capacity — working days less leave, meetings and the share of time that never goes on planned work — and you confirm or correct the draft rather than filling in a form.
- Asks for
- Who is on the team, pasted as a list — names and roles are enough
- The sprint length and dates
- Your tickets with estimates, if you want them fitted
- Gives back
- A drafted capacity you confirm or correct, not a form you fill
- Working days less leave, holidays, meetings and unplanned work
- Which tickets fit, and which do not
- Whether the sprint is over-committed, said plainly
- Plan
- Free
- Use next
- Prioritisation, Roadmap, Epic
What it gives you
Sprint 14 — 10 working days, 4 people Raw 40 person-days Leave (Ana, 3 days) −3 Public holiday −4 (all four, 11 Nov) Standing meetings −4 (10% — correct this if yours is worse) Unplanned / support −6 (20%, from your last three sprints) ────────────────────────── Capacity 23 person-days Tickets offered: 31 days. Over-committed by 8. The last three do not fit.
How it works
Sprint capacity is usually calculated as people times days, which is wrong by a third before the sprint starts. Leave, public holidays, the standing meetings, the on-call rotation, the support that arrives whether or not it was planned: all of it comes out of the same hours, and a plan that ignores it commits the team to work that was never available.
So it drafts the subtractions and shows them to you. The draft is the interface: you paste the names, see the assumed leave, meeting load and unplanned-work share, and correct the ones that are wrong. That takes a minute and is a different experience from a setup form asking you eleven questions you have to look up.
Then it fits the tickets. Given estimates it tells you what goes in and what does not, and it will tell you the sprint is over-committed rather than quietly rounding — which is the number worth having before the planning meeting instead of in the retrospective.
Who it is for
A PM or delivery lead planning a sprint who is tired of committing to a number the team cannot hit and finding out in week two.
Where it stops
It plans with the estimates you give it, and estimates are the weak link — a tidy capacity against optimistic estimates is a tidy wrong answer. It also cannot know your team: if the drafted leave or meeting load is wrong, correct it, because everything downstream is arithmetic on those numbers.
Questions people ask
Do I have to fill in a form about my team first?
No. Paste the team as a list and you are shown a drafted capacity with its assumptions visible — assumed leave, meeting load, the share of time that goes on unplanned work — and you correct the lines that are wrong. Correcting a draft takes a minute; answering eleven questions you have to go and look up takes an afternoon and is the reason most capacity tools get abandoned after one sprint.
Why subtract unplanned work from capacity?
Because it happens regardless, and if it is not subtracted it is paid for out of the committed work. Support, interruptions, the bug that cannot wait: in most teams that is fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the sprint. Planning as though it were zero is how a team commits to ten days of work in eight days of available time, every sprint, and concludes that it is bad at estimating.
Can it tell me the sprint is over-committed?
Yes, plainly, with the number of person-days over and which tickets do not fit. That is the main thing it is for. The useful moment is before the planning meeting rather than during it: arriving with a capacity of twenty-three days and a request for thirty-one changes the conversation from whether the team can try harder to which eight days of work are coming out.
Run it on your own work
Capacity planner needs an account, because it writes against what you give it and remembers what you have told it before. It runs on the Free plan. Or see what the plans cost first.