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# Capacity and WIP
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Duration: 30–40 minutes
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Duration: 30--40 minutes
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## Definition
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Plan around real team capacity, operational interruptions, and limits on concurrent work.
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This lesson is part of the Project Management track and builds on the concepts learned in the previous lessons.
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Capacity is the amount of work a person or team can realistically take
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on. Work in Progress (WIP) is work started but not finished. A WIP limit
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deliberately restricts concurrent work.
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## Simple Mental Model
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The goal is not to add project-management bureaucracy. The goal is to make the project easier to understand, predict, and manage.
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**Starting more does not mean finishing more.**
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## How It Works
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We will examine this concept through four levels:
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A 35-hour work week is not 35 project hours:
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1. What the concept means.
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2. How a project owner should use it.
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3. How you should review or challenge it as the manager.
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4. How it should eventually appear in your project-management system.
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## Example
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The exercises for this lesson should use real projects from your environment such as Umami, Mogador, QA automation, data governance, website/Product initiatives, or projects dependent on DevOps and Security.
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The objective is to move from theory to a repeatable management practice.
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## How It Fits Into the Bigger Picture
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The course builds progressively:
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- Project vs operations establishes what kind of work we are managing.
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- Outcomes and Definition of Done establish what success means.
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- Scope establishes the project's boundaries.
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- Milestones establish meaningful progress.
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- Dependencies, estimation, prioritization, capacity, risks, and health make delivery more predictable.
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- Status reporting, meetings, ownership, and portfolio management make the system scalable.
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- Closing and the final PM system turn the concepts into an operating method.
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## My Company / Real-World Context
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Your team works across departmental projects, Product work, operational incidents, tickets, data, QA, SEO/WCAG, and dependencies on IT teams such as DevOps and Security.
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The lesson should therefore be applied to an environment where:
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- Project owners are usually members of your own team rather than dedicated PMs.
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- Operational work regularly interrupts project work.
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- Product and IT are important cross-functional partners.
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- You need portfolio-level visibility without personally maintaining every task.
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- Project owners should increasingly draft and maintain their own project plans while you validate, challenge, prioritize, and escalate.
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## CTO Perspective
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The leadership objective is to move progressively from personally coordinating work toward building a management system that produces reliable outcomes.
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The expected progression is:
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```text
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Contributor → manages tasks
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Project Owner → drives milestones and delivery
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Manager → manages projects, priorities, risks and escalation
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Technology Leader → manages portfolio, capacity, outcomes and organizational trade-offs
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``` text
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35 hours
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├── 10h operations/tickets
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├── 5h meetings/admin
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├── 5h support/incidents
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└── 15h project capacity
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```
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The exact split varies. The principle is that operational work consumes
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real capacity.
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Capacity also depends on specialties. You can have available developer
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capacity while QA is overloaded, making QA the bottleneck.
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Too much WIP creates context switching:
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> Start → interrupt → switch → wait → restart
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Reducing WIP can increase throughput even though fewer projects appear
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active.
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### Example
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Two integrators each have four active projects plus tickets. After a
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month, all eight projects moved slightly but none finished. Limiting
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major active projects can produce fewer "In Progress" rows but more
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completed outcomes.
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### My Company / Real-World Context
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Your team handles projects, Product work, Jira tickets, synchronization
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incidents, QA, Data, SEO/WCAG, and meetings. Your portfolio should
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eventually show what is truly active and what is intentionally queued.
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Operational interruptions that happen every week are not exceptional.
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Planning should account for them.
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### CTO Perspective
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If leadership wants ten initiatives but the organization can reliably
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execute four, expose the constraint. Choices include doing fewer things,
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reducing scope, extending timelines, adding capacity, reducing
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operational load, improving automation, or accepting risk.
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### Questions to Ask
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- What information do I need to make a management decision?
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- What should the project owner be responsible for maintaining?
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- What requires my intervention?
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- What can be standardized across every project?
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- Is the process helping delivery, or merely creating administration?
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- How much project capacity do we actually have?
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- What percentage is regularly consumed by operations?
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- How many projects are active per owner?
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- Which role is the bottleneck?
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- What should remain queued?
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- What does a new project displace?
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## Meeting Scenario
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### Key Takeaways
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**Situation:**
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- Theoretical hours are not project capacity.
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- Operations consume capacity and should be planned for.
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- Too much WIP creates context switching and unfinished work.
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- WIP limits help teams finish before starting more.
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- Bottlenecks may be role-specific.
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- A healthy portfolio contains queued work, not only active work.
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A project owner gives you an update, but the information does not make it clear whether the project will achieve its intended outcome.
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## How It Fits Into the Bigger Picture
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**Possible response:**
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> Let's bring this back to the project plan. Show me where we are against the next meaningful checkpoint, what is at risk, and what decision or help you need from me.
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## Key Takeaways
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- The purpose of project management is predictable delivery, not documentation for its own sake.
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- Project owners should own increasingly more of the planning and maintenance.
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- Your role is to challenge assumptions, establish priorities, remove/escalate blockers, and manage the portfolio.
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- Every concept learned should eventually contribute to one lightweight common project template.
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- The final system should make exceptions and problems visible without requiring you to inspect every task.
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This lesson builds on \[\[Projects vs Operations\]\], \[\[Outcomes and
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Definition of Done\]\], \[\[Scope and Scope Creep\]\], and
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\[\[Milestones vs Tasks\]\]. It prepares the project system to become
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more predictable and scalable.
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## Related Concepts
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- [[Projects vs Operations]]
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- [[Project Outcome]]
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- [[Definition of Done]]
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- [[Scope]]
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- [[Milestone]]
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- [[Dependencies]]
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- [[Capacity]]
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- [[Risk]]
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- [[Project Health]]
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- [[Portfolio Management]]
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- \[\[Milestones vs Tasks\]\]
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- \[\[Dependencies\]\]
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- \[\[Estimation and Forecasting\]\]
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- \[\[Prioritization\]\]
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- \[[Capacity and WIP](#capacity-and-wip)\]
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- \[\[Risk Management\]\]
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- \[\[Project Health\]\]
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- \[\[Portfolio Management\]\]
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