Team Resource Allocation Calculator
Match your team capacity against project demand before you commit to a delivery date. Enter each person's availability and each project's hours, then see who is overloaded, which projects run short staffed and what the programme costs every week.
📘 What this calculator does
This tool answers one question that sinks more improvement projects than any technical problem. Does your team actually have the hours to deliver the work you have committed to. It takes each person's real availability, converts it into hours per week, then tests that capacity against the weekly demand created by every project on your list.
The engine allocates hours the way a sensible planner would. High priority work is staffed first, then medium, then low. Inside each priority band the project with the nearest deadline goes first. Hours flow to whoever has the most spare capacity, so the load spreads instead of landing on one person. If the target utilisation buffer runs out, the engine dips into the reserve and flags every person it pushes past the target.
You end up with an allocation health score out of 100, a utilisation figure for every person, a coverage figure for every project and a weekly cost. Those are the numbers you take into a project charter, a steering meeting or a resourcing conversation with a sponsor who wants everything delivered at once.
🧮 The formulas
Capacity per week equals availability percentage divided by 100, multiplied by standard hours per week.
Target capacity per week equals capacity per week multiplied by target utilisation divided by 100.
Project demand per week equals total project hours divided by weeks to deadline.
Utilisation equals allocated hours divided by capacity per week, multiplied by 100.
Project coverage equals allocated hours per week divided by demand per week, multiplied by 100.
Allocation health score equals demand coverage multiplied by 40, plus utilisation balance multiplied by 25, plus overload control multiplied by 20, plus priority protection multiplied by 15.
🔧 How to use it
- Set your standard working week. Australian salaried teams usually run 38 hours. Change it if your site uses 40 or a rostered pattern.
- Set target utilisation. Use 80 percent unless you have a strong reason to go higher. The remaining 20 percent absorbs leave, meetings, rework and interruptions.
- Add every person who will touch the work. Give each one a realistic availability percentage for improvement work, not their employment fraction.
- Enter each person's hourly cost. Use fully loaded cost including on costs, not base salary divided by hours.
- Add every project competing for the same people. Missing one project is the fastest way to produce a plan that fails.
- Enter total estimated hours and weeks to deadline for each project. The tool converts both into a weekly demand figure.
- Set a priority for each project. High priority work is staffed before anything else, so this field changes the result.
- Click Calculate allocation, then read the health score, the utilisation table and the recommended actions.
📊 Allocation health score bands
| Score | Band | What it means | What to do next |
|---|---|---|---|
| 85 to 100 | Optimised | Every project is staffed, utilisation sits near target and nobody is pushed past the buffer. | Lock the plan and set up a weekly capacity review. |
| 70 to 84 | Workable | The plan holds, with one or two pressure points that need watching. | Fix the named pressure points before kickoff. |
| 55 to 69 | Strained | Coverage or balance is slipping. Delivery depends on nothing going wrong. | Rescope, extend a deadline or add capacity now. |
| 40 to 54 | Overcommitted | Demand exceeds what the team can supply. Dates will move. | Cut or defer the lowest priority projects. |
| Below 40 | Critical | The commitment is not deliverable with this team. | Renegotiate scope and dates with the sponsor this week. |
📈 Utilisation benchmarks
| Utilisation | Reading | Effect on delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Below 60 percent | Underloaded | Capacity sits idle. Add scope or release the person to other work. |
| 60 to 74 percent | Comfortable | Room for unplanned work. Common early in a programme. |
| 75 to 85 percent | Healthy | The target zone. Productive without being fragile. |
| 86 to 100 percent | Stretched | No buffer left. One absence pushes a deadline. |
| Above 100 percent | Overloaded | The commitment is arithmetically impossible. Work will queue. |
⚠️ Common mistakes
- Using employment fraction as availability. A full time engineer is not 100 percent available for project work. Business as usual, meetings and leave usually leave 40 to 60 percent.
- Planning to 100 percent utilisation. A team booked to the last hour has no capacity for rework, and rework is guaranteed in a Define phase project.
- Leaving competing projects out of the model. Capacity is shared. A person allocated 20 hours here is not free for 20 hours somewhere else.
- Using base salary instead of fully loaded cost. On costs, superannuation, leave loading and overheads typically add 25 to 40 percent.
- Estimating project hours from a gut feel. Use historical actuals from a similar project, or a three point estimate, before you enter a number.
💡 Pro tips
- Run the model twice. Once with the availability people claim, and once with the availability their calendar proves. The gap is your real risk.
- If the score lands below 55, do not fix it by raising target utilisation. That hides the problem instead of solving it.
- Check the priority protection component. A high score with poorly covered high priority work means the engine spent capacity on the wrong projects.
- Weekly cost is a negotiation tool. Sponsors who will not cut scope often move faster when they see the burn rate.
- Rerun the model whenever a deadline moves. Shortening weeks to deadline raises weekly demand sharply on a fixed hour estimate.
- Take the spare capacity figure to your portfolio meeting. Idle hours are as expensive as overloaded ones.
🎯 Where this fits in DMAIC
This is a Define phase tool. You use it after the project charter names a scope and before the sponsor signs a delivery date. It answers the resourcing section of the charter with arithmetic instead of optimism.
It also earns a second run in Improve. Once you have a shortlist of solutions, each one carries an implementation hour estimate. Feeding those into the model shows whether your team can actually deliver the solution set inside the control phase timeline, or whether you need to sequence the rollout.
📥 Load a sample dataset
Load an industry example to see how the model behaves, then replace it with your own team and projects.
⚙️ Planning settings
These two values drive every capacity figure in the model.
👥 Team members
Enter availability as the share of a standard week this person can give to project work. Use fully loaded hourly cost.
📋 Projects
Add every project competing for these people. Total hours divided by weeks to deadline becomes the weekly demand.
⚠️ No analysis yet
Add your team and your projects in the Calculator tab, then click Calculate allocation to generate your resourcing plan.
What is team resource allocation
Team resource allocation is the process of matching the hours your people can actually give against the hours your projects actually need. It converts availability into a weekly capacity figure, converts project estimates into a weekly demand figure, then compares the two. Where demand exceeds capacity you have a staffing gap. Where capacity exceeds demand you have idle cost.
Most teams do this in their heads. That works until three projects land in the same quarter, at which point the arithmetic stops being intuitive. A person at 60 percent availability on a 38 hour week has 22.8 hours. Once you subtract a 20 percent buffer they have 18.2 hours of committable time. Two projects each wanting 12 hours a week from that person cannot both be delivered on time, and no amount of goodwill changes that.
How the allocation health score works
The score is a weighted composite of four measures, each scored between zero and one, then converted to a mark out of 100.
- Demand coverage, 40 percent. Allocated hours divided by required hours across all projects. This is the single biggest driver because an uncovered project is a missed date.
- Utilisation balance, 25 percent. How close each person sits to your target utilisation. Both underloading and overloading pull this down.
- Overload control, 20 percent. The share of the team that stayed inside the target buffer. Every person pushed past target costs you points here.
- Priority protection, 15 percent. Coverage of high priority projects only. A plan that staffs low priority work while high priority work starves scores badly even with strong overall coverage.
Splitting the score this way stops one good number hiding a bad one. A team can hit 100 percent coverage and still score poorly if half the people are 30 percent over target, because that plan collapses the first time someone takes leave.
How the allocation engine assigns hours
The engine runs two passes. In the first pass it works through the projects in priority order, high before medium before low, and inside each band it takes the nearest deadline first. For each project it hands hours to whoever has the most spare capacity remaining, stopping at the target utilisation ceiling. That first pass produces a plan with the buffer intact.
If demand still remains after the first pass, the second pass releases the buffer and allocates up to full capacity. Every person the engine pushes past target is flagged as overloaded in the results. Anything still unallocated after the second pass is reported as a genuine weekly shortfall, which is the number you take to a sponsor when asking for more people or a longer runway.
Working out a realistic availability percentage
Availability is the field people get wrong most often. Start from the standard week, then remove everything that is not project work.
- Annual leave, public holidays and personal leave average 15 to 18 percent of the year in Australia
- Recurring meetings, one on ones and team ceremonies usually take 10 to 20 percent
- Business as usual duties for anyone who is not a full time project resource
- Training, compliance modules and performance reviews
- Administration, email and approvals, which rarely fall below 5 percent
A full time employee with moderate business as usual duties typically lands between 45 and 65 percent available for improvement work. A senior manager sponsoring a project rarely clears 15 percent. Enter the number their calendar supports, not the number they would like to be true.
Who uses this calculator
- Green Belts and Black Belts sizing the resourcing section of a project charter
- Programme managers testing whether a portfolio fits inside the team they have
- Operations leaders deciding between hiring, contracting and deferring scope
- Team leads defending a delivery date with numbers instead of opinion
- PMO analysts building a quarterly capacity plan across competing initiatives
What to do after the analysis
- Take the weekly shortfall figure into the sponsor conversation before you accept a delivery date.
- Fix the named overloaded people first. Move their hours to whoever the model shows as underloaded.
- Defer or cut the lowest priority project if coverage on high priority work sits below 100 percent.
- Convert the weekly cost into a total programme cost and check it against the benefit case in your charter.
- Rerun the model at every gate review. Availability changes, and a plan built on last quarter's numbers is already wrong.
Related Lean Six Sigma calculators
- Project Charter ROI Calculator tests whether the resourcing cost is justified by the benefit.
- Project Prioritisation Matrix Calculator sets the priority order this tool staffs against.
- Stakeholder Impact Calculator identifies who needs to release these people.
- Takt Time Calculator converts customer demand into a required process rate.
- Cycle Time Analysis Calculator checks whether the work itself can be shortened before you add people.
- Quick Win Identification Calculator finds the low hour improvements that free capacity fast.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate team capacity per week?
Multiply each person's availability percentage by your standard weekly hours, then divide by 100. A person at 60 percent availability on a 38 hour week has 22.8 hours of capacity. Add every person together for total team capacity.
What is a healthy team utilisation rate?
Between 75 and 85 percent. Below 60 percent you are carrying idle cost. Above 85 percent you have no buffer for leave, rework or unplanned work, and a single absence will move a deadline.
Why does the calculator flag people as overloaded when they are under 100 percent?
Overloaded means past your target utilisation, not past full capacity. If your target is 80 percent, a person at 92 percent is inside their physical hours but outside the buffer that absorbs leave and rework. That is a real delivery risk.
How many projects and people should I enter?
Enter every person and every project sharing the same capacity pool. The model works from two people upwards, but leaving out a competing project produces a plan that looks healthy and fails in practice.
Does the model assume projects run at the same time?
Yes. Each project spreads its total hours evenly across its weeks to deadline, and all projects draw from the same weekly capacity pool. If two projects genuinely run in sequence, model them separately or adjust the weeks to deadline so the timelines do not overlap.
What hourly rate should I use?
Fully loaded cost, which is base pay plus superannuation, leave loading, on costs and overhead recovery. That usually sits 25 to 40 percent above base salary divided by hours. Using base pay understates programme cost.
Can I export the results?
Yes. The calculator generates a branded four sheet Excel workbook containing a summary, your raw inputs, the utilisation and staffing analysis with the full allocation matrix, and an action plan with owners and timing.
