Who Has Room This Week? A Field Checklist for Cross-Project Capacity
If you run more than a handful of projects with a shared pool of people, you have felt the squeeze: every project lead swears their work is urgent, the same two specialists appear on every plan, and someone is quietly working weekends to keep it all moving. Hybrid and remote work has made this harder to see — you can no longer glance across the room to tell who is buried. Capacity planning across projects is how you replace that guesswork with something you can act on.
This is a working checklist, not a theory lecture. Block ninety minutes this week and go through it with whoever holds the staffing picture.
Get the supply and demand on one page
List your people and their realistic weekly availability — not 40 hours, but the time left after meetings, support duties, leave, and admin. Many planners use 60–70% of nominal time as the honest number.
List every active and committed-but-not-started project, with the roles and rough effort each needs over the next four to eight weeks.
Put both views side by side, by person and by week. The clashes will jump out immediately.
Flag the people who appear on three or more projects at once — they are your true constraint, not the average.
Pressure-test what you see
Separate committed from wished-for. Distinguish work that is approved and funded from work people hope to start. You cannot plan capacity against a wish list, and mixing the two inflates demand.
Check the bottleneck roles first. Capacity is set by your scarcest skill, not your total headcount. Find the one or two roles everyone needs and plan around them before worrying about anyone else.
Account for the invisible work. Onboarding, rework, incident response, and answering questions all consume real hours. If your plan assumes 100% productive time, it is already wrong.
Name the assumptions out loud. Write down what you are assuming about leave, hiring, and a contractor arriving on time. When one breaks, you will know exactly what to revisit.
Decide and make it visible
Where demand exceeds supply, choose deliberately: sequence projects, move a deadline, add or borrow a person, or reduce scope. Doing nothing is also a choice — usually the worst one.
Confirm priority with the people who own the portfolio, not just the loudest project lead.
Publish the resulting plan so every lead sees the same picture and the same trade-offs.
Set a short, regular review — weekly or biweekly — because availability drifts the moment a project slips.
You will not get this perfect, and you do not need to. The goal is a shared, honest view of who has room and who does not, refreshed often enough to stay true. That alone prevents most of the overcommitment, burnout, and missed dates that quietly sink a portfolio.
If your projects keep colliding over the same scarce people, XNM's program & project delivery advisory can help you build a capacity view your whole portfolio can trust.