Free capacity planning template

What you get

A working Excel workbook, free to download and use, with three sheets:

• Instructions - what each sheet is for, and how to complete it in about twenty minutes with a team.
• Capacity model - available hours per person against the categories of work that consume them. The totals and percentages calculate themselves.
• Friction log - each occurrence of avoidable work, its cause, the minutes it cost, and a calculated cost at your own hourly rate.

No email address required, no sign-up, no tracking. It is a spreadsheet.

How to use it

1. Fill in the people and their available hours for a typical week - contracted hours less leave, training and known absence.
2. List the work categories with the team and allocate hours honestly. One row per person per category. Include the categories nobody likes admitting to: rework, waiting, searching, reconciling.
3. Record the friction you can see this week. Five or six recurring interruptions is enough to start. Log the cause as well as the event.
4. Put your own loaded hourly rate in the friction sheet and the cost column does the rest.
5. Read the percentages, not the totals. The productive share is rarely the interesting number. The size of the non-productive categories, and which cause they point at, is what changes decisions.

Two rules that keep the numbers defensible

• Write your definitions down. What counts as available, and what counts as productive. A figure with its basis attached survives a challenge from finance or operations. A bare percentage does not.
• Label estimates as estimates. An honest estimate showing its reasoning is more useful than a false precision.

The example rows in the workbook are illustrative, so you can see the shape of a completed sheet. Replace them with your own.

What to do with the result

The output is not a report, it is a shortlist: the three or four causes consuming the most capacity, each with an owner and a proposed change. If the workbook produces a number nobody acts on, it has failed regardless of how accurate it is.

If you want the capture to be continuous rather than a fortnightly exercise in a spreadsheet, that is what Zunox does. Background reading: what Capacity Intelligence is and how to measure operational friction.

Common questions

Is the template really free?

Yes. No email address, no sign-up form and no tracking. Download it and use it.

What format is it?

An Excel workbook (.xlsx) with the formulas already in place, so the totals, percentages and costs calculate as you type. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice.

Do I need special software to be accurate?

No. A spreadsheet and an honest hour with the team will get you a defensible first pass. Software matters when you want the capture to be continuous rather than a manual exercise that goes stale.

How long does it take?

About twenty minutes to complete a first pass for a small team. The friction log is worth keeping open for a week, because the recurring interruptions are easier to catch as they happen.

See what your organisation’s work actually looks like.

Zunox captures activity where it happens, attributes it, and turns it into evidence you can act on.