Search for "capacity management best practices" and you'll find dozens of guides. They're well-written, thorough, and remarkably similar.
They'll tell you to forecast demand. Track utilization. Set realistic targets. Monitor KPIs. Use the right tools.
Good advice. Solid fundamentals.
But they all skip the same step.
And it's the step that determines whether everything else actually works.
What the guides tell you
Here's the typical best practices list, condensed from a dozen top-ranking articles:
- Understand current capacity — Know what your team can handle
- Forecast demand — Anticipate upcoming work
- Balance workloads — Distribute work fairly across the team
- Track utilization — Monitor how much capacity is being used
- Build flexibility — Plan for spikes and unexpected changes
- Use technology — Implement tools to manage capacity data
- Monitor and adjust — Review regularly and iterate
These practices assume something critical: that you already know what "capacity" means for your team. That you've quantified your work. That everyone agrees on what a reasonable workload looks like.
Most teams haven't done any of that.
The hidden assumption
Every best practice in the typical guide assumes work is already defined.
- "Track utilization" assumes you know what 100% looks like
- "Forecast demand" assumes you can quantify incoming work
- "Balance workloads" assumes you can compare loads across people
- "Set targets" assumes you know what's achievable
But how do you track utilization if you haven't agreed on what work costs? How do you forecast demand if you can't quantify it? How do you balance workloads if you have no shared understanding of what "balanced" means?
You can't. Or rather, you can—but you're building on sand.
Traditional capacity tools don't even know this step exists. They jump straight to tracking and scheduling as if the foundation is already there. That's why teams keep struggling with the same problems. They're not starting at the beginning.
The missing practice: shared work definition
Before you can track, forecast, or balance anything, you need your team to agree on three things:
1. What work do we actually do?
Not projects. Not clients. The types of work that repeat—the building blocks that show up across engagements. Social media management. Monthly reporting. Campaign setup. Client communication. Strategy sessions.
And alongside that: What do we actually sell? What are our deliverables? How does what we sell compare to what we actually do?
This becomes your work catalog. A shared vocabulary for what your team does.
2. How demanding is each type of work—really?
Not hours. Hours lie. A 30-minute interruption can drain more energy than a 3-hour focused block.
Effort captures what hours miss: cognitive load, context switching, emotional labor, client complexity. And here's what makes effort powerful—the same work takes different levels of difficulty depending on experience. A senior team member handles a monthly report with ease; it's a small slice of their capacity. A junior team member finds the same report challenging; it takes a larger share of what they can handle. If you already expect less from junior employees and more from senior ones, effort scoring is how you quantify that gap.
When you ask "how demanding is this work when it shows up in someone's week?" you get answers people can be honest about.
And here's what matters: the team decides together. Not manager-imposed scores based on assumptions. Collaborative definition based on the people actually doing the work.
3. Who has which work, and why?
Once you've mapped work types and effort, you can see who's carrying what. Not just "Sarah has 12 clients" but "Sarah has 650 effort points and Jordan has 400."
Now "balance workloads" means something concrete. Now you can see whether distribution reflects role expectations or just historical accident.
Why this is missing from every guide
You won't find "facilitate shared work definition" in the best practice listicles. There are a few reasons:
It's uncomfortable. Getting five people to agree on how hard work is surfaces disagreements. Someone will feel like their work is being undervalued. Someone else will realize they've been carrying more than their share. These are hard conversations.
It's not a feature. You can't screenshot shared understanding. It doesn't fit in a product demo. Traditional capacity tools don't even know this step exists—they jump straight to tracking and scheduling as if the foundation is already there. That's why teams keep struggling with the same problems. They're not starting at the beginning.
It requires facilitation, not implementation. You can roll out a tool in a week. Building genuine alignment on what work means takes longer and requires someone to guide the conversation—asking questions, surfacing inconsistencies, helping the team arrive at shared definitions.
Most capacity guides are written by software companies. They're optimized to show you how their tool solves the problem. But the hardest part of capacity management isn't the software. It's the conversation that has to happen before the software is useful.
What breaks without shared definition
Skip this step and watch what happens to the "best practices":
Forecasting becomes fiction. You can project demand all you want, but if you can't quantify what that demand actually costs, your forecast is a guess wearing a spreadsheet costume.
Utilization loses meaning. 80% utilization of what? If you haven't defined capacity, the percentage is noise. Worse—it's noise that looks like signal.
Workload balancing creates new problems. You shift work from Sarah to Jordan to "balance" things. But without shared definitions, you might be moving high-effort work that looks lightweight on paper. Jordan gets crushed. Sarah feels fine but confused about why her work was reassigned.
KPIs create false confidence. Dashboards full of green checkmarks while your team burns out. The numbers say everything's fine. The numbers are wrong.
How to start
If the best practice guides won't tell you, we will. Here's how to build shared work definition.
Conversation 1: "What work do we actually do?"
Get your team in a room (or a call). Ask them to list the types of work that repeat across clients and projects. Not specific deliverables—categories.
Then ask: What do we actually sell to clients? How do those two things compare?
You'll discover that people use different words for the same thing. You'll find groups of people repeating the same work without realizing it. You'll uncover gaps—things that have been forgotten over time, work that everyone assumed someone else was tracking. You'll start building a shared vocabulary.
This is the foundation of your work catalog.
Conversation 2: "How demanding is this—really?"
Take your work catalog and score each item for effort. Use a simple scale—1 to 5 works fine. Don't overthink precision; focus on relative comparison.
Remember: you're scoring difficulty, not duration. How demanding is this work when it shows up in someone's week? An experienced team member might breeze through a task that challenges a newer hire. The effort score stays the same—but experienced people can handle more total effort, while the same work takes a larger share of a junior team member's capacity.
This conversation needs both veteran and new voices. When someone says "client reporting is a 2" and someone else says "it's a 4," don't average it. Dig in. Why do you see it differently? You'll often find that experience level shapes perception—and that's exactly the insight you need.
Conversation 3: "Who has what, and why?"
Map your clients and projects to your work catalog. Add up the effort scores for each person.
This conversation can happen differently. As a manager, you might do this mapping alone first—giving yourself time to sit with the numbers, process what you're seeing, and think through implications before bringing it to the team.
Each team member should have time to sit with their individual numbers too. How does their total effort compare to what's expected for their role? Are they stretched thin, or do they have room to grow?
Compare the numbers to experience level, pay grade, or role expectations. That's where the real insights emerge. "Sarah has 650 effort points and she's a mid-level specialist. Jordan has 400 and he's junior. That actually makes sense." Or: "Wait, these two are at the same level but the distribution is way off."
Now you can do something about it.
Making it sustainable
These conversations work. They surface insights that utilization tracking never will.
They can be difficult conversations to have—but they're well worth the time and energy to get a shared understanding.
The challenge is sustaining them. Work catalogs live in one file, assignments in another, capacity math in a third. Someone has to keep it updated. When clients change scope or team members shift, the data gets stale.
That's why we built Capysaurus—to make shared work definition sustainable. One place where your team's work catalog, effort scores, assignments, and capacity all connect. So the conversations you have translate into data you can actually use.
But whether you use Capysaurus or not, start with the conversations. The best practices in every guide will work better once you do.
Want help having these conversations? We've put together a guide with the 10 capacity conversations your team isn't having (but should be). Download it here.
Or if you're ready to make it sustainable: Try Capysaurus free and see how shared work definition changes everything.
