How to prevent overallocation without leaving people underused.
Balance delivery commitments and useful available time without planning every hour as if it were interchangeable.
Overallocation is usually a visibility and decision problem.
Projects make commitments independently, tentative work becomes treated as confirmed, and capacity is calculated without leave or internal responsibilities. The result is a plan that appears efficient until several deadlines arrive together.
Protect capacity before filling it.
- ✓Use each person’s real schedule and leave.
- ✓Reserve explicit time for support, leadership, learning, and operational work.
- ✓Separate requested, tentative, and confirmed allocation.
- ✓Plan to a sustainable utilization range rather than 100 percent.
- ✓Review the same future periods across every active project.
Available time is not automatically waste.
Small capacity buffers absorb estimation error, urgent support, review work, and change. Larger gaps need a visible decision: bring planned work forward, contribute to another project, improve systems, or build a capability the portfolio will soon need.
Use a short weekly exception review.
Focus the conversation on new overload, newly available capacity, unfilled demand, and the assumptions that changed. This keeps the meeting about decisions rather than reconstructing data.