Capacity and demand planning

This is operational throughput — how much work the organization can absorb. Allocating people across projects is portfolio work, handled in pmo:portfolio-governance.

Forecast demand honestly

Separate the three components, because they need different treatment:

• Baseline — the steady rate, best estimated from your own history rather than from a plan.
• Trend — the direction, measured over enough periods to distinguish it from noise.
• Spikes — launches, seasonality, campaigns, incidents. Known spikes are a planning input; unknown ones are what headroom is for.

Forecast in the unit the work actually arrives in — tickets, orders, shipments, minutes of handling — not in revenue. Revenue divided by an average is a forecast of an average, and averages are where capacity planning goes to die.

Capacity is not headcount