Resource Capacity: Where Have All My People Gone?

My friend and colleague Terry Doerscher, Chief Process Architect at Planview, has a superb blog called Enterprise Navigator, and recently posted an excerpt from his upcoming book, Taming Change with Portfolio Management, which he co-authored with Planview CEO Pat Durbin.

The excerpt talks about resource capacity planning and reveals a startling fact: For an average staff of 500 people, there's only enough capacity for about 12 medium sized projects at any given time! Thus it's no surprise when similar sized organizations flounder in their attempts to take on hundreds of projects.

Where does all this capacity go? For the answer, read on..

PS: This supports my longtime stance that many organizations suffer from a lack of strategic focus, and try to take on too many parallel initiatives as compared with their capacity to deliver. In essence, they plan to infinite capacity.