Sprint capacity planner

A team of five in a two-week sprint does not have four hundred hours. Put in ceremonies, holidays and a realistic focus factor, and see what's actually available to commit.

Your sprint

Team members

Working days in sprint

Hours per person per day

Focus factor

70%

The share of available time that reaches sprint work once support, interruptions, context switching and admin are accounted for. 70% is a common honest starting point; measure yours after two sprints.

Ceremony hours per person Planning, refinement, review, retro and stand-ups, per person, per sprint.

Holiday / absence days Total across the whole team for this sprint.

Hours per story point Only if you convert to points. Derive it from your own history.

Committable capacity

Sprint work
Focus-factor overhead
Ceremonies
Absence

Raw team hours-

Holiday / absence-

Ceremonies-

Focus-factor overhead-

Available per person-

Roughly, in story points-

Why sprints miss

Almost every missed sprint I've looked at was planned against raw hours. Five people, ten days, eight hours: four hundred hours of work committed. The team then spends the sprint discovering the other three deductions the plan never made.

Ceremonies are real work time. Planning, refinement, review, retro and ten stand-ups add up to somewhere between five and eight hours per person per sprint. That's most of a day each, gone before anyone opens an editor.

Focus factor is not pessimism. It's the measured share of time that reaches the committed work - after production support, interruptions, hiring interviews, the incident on Tuesday and the twenty minutes it takes to get back into a task after each of those. Teams that measure it honestly land between 55% and 75%. If yours claims 90%, it isn't measuring, it's hoping.

Absence is lumpy. One person on holiday in a two-week sprint removes 10% of a five-person team's capacity, and if that person is the only one who knows the payment integration, it removes rather more than that.

Use it as a ceiling, not a target. The number this tool gives you is the most you could commit if everything goes normally. Commit to slightly less, and let the team pull more in when the sprint allows. A sprint that finishes early builds trust; a sprint that finishes at 80% burns it - even when it's the same amount of work.

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  Sprint capacity planner by
  <a href="https://veljkobarnic.com/tools/sprint-capacity/">Veljko Barnić</a>
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