Capacity planning dashboard with overbooking alerts

The problem

Double-booking does not look like a mistake when it happens. It looks like two cells that each make sense: 6 hours a day on the migration, 4 hours a day on a bug fix for another client. Nobody adds them up until the developer is working ten-hour days and the second project slips.

The other half of the problem is the opposite. Somebody has been quietly at 50 percent for three weeks, and the sales call that could have used them ended with “we are full right now”.

Both questions need the same thing: a total per person that updates when the plan changes, and a place where the totals that are wrong rise to the top.

How it works in PepperPlanner

The Dashboard reads the Schedule and shows the team’s capacity for a period: this week, next week, this month, next month. Team utilization, available hours, the number of people over capacity, the number with low utilization, and how many are on vacation.

Below the numbers are the lists that make them actionable. Overbooked shows each person over capacity, by how many hours and on how many projects. Low utilization shows who has room and how much. On vacation shows who is away and for how long. Capacity by position breaks utilization down by PM, developer, QA, designer and whatever positions you use, so you can see that QA is at 106 percent while design is at 81 before it becomes a problem.

The alerts are not a separate feature; they are the same arithmetic surfaced where you are. On the Schedule, a person’s total turns red the moment an allocation pushes them over, and the overlapping bars are highlighted. On the Dashboard they are listed. In the daily digest, if you turn it on, they are posted to your team chat in the morning.

Capacity respects time off. A person on vacation next week has zero available hours, so a bar planned across that week is a conflict, not a plan. Public holidays reduce everyone’s capacity for the day. A person with 6 daily hours has a 30-hour week, not 40.

We look at “next week” more than “this week”. This week is already happening; next week can still be moved. The Friday ritual at Peppernode is to open next week, fix anything red, and find a project for anyone with more than a day free.

What the Dashboard does not do: it does not know what was actually worked. It is a view of the plan. If the plan says 40 hours and the person did 30, the dashboard still says 40. That is on purpose; we chose a planner, not a timesheet, and the reports are built on the same planned numbers.