Team Capacity Planner
How many people you need, with the math shown: shrinkage, focus factor, utilization targets, P90 demand, Erlang C, and hiring lead time.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
That depends on a lot of factors. You'd want to think about your average ticket volume per day, how long tickets take to resolve, and what your service level agreement is. There's probably some kind of formula you could use to estimate, but honestly you'd need to know more about your specific situation to give you a real number. Do you have data on your current ticket load?
SUPPORT CAPACITY ANALYSIS INPUT ASSUMPTIONS • Annual tickets: 150k (410/day) • Avg handle time: 18 min per ticket • Target service level: 80% answered <4 hours (SLA) • Team utilization cap: 75% (prevent burnout) • Annual shrinkage: 18% (PTO, training, admin) • Weeks per year: 48 (4 weeks vacation standard) ERLANG-C CALCULATION • Peak daily volume: 550 tickets (30% variance) • Occupancy at peak (Erlang): 82% ← Hit cap, needs queuing • Concurrent agents needed for 4-hour answer: 8.5 agents • Apply shrinkage factor (1.22x): 10.4 agents • Round for hiring: 11 agents HEADCOUNT PLAN Q3: Hire 5 (ramp: 2 productive weeks each) Q4: Hire 4 (include 1 lead) Q1 2027: Hire 2 (specialists, senior tier) Total: 11 FTE by Q1 RISK FLAGS • Current utilization trending 78% - hiring urgent • If MTTR drops below 16 min, can reduce by 1 FTE • Peak spike seasons: plan for 15% overflow (freelance pool)
About this skill
Dividing total work hours by 40 gives a headcount that fails the first busy month. This skill sizes a team with the math shown, so you can change any assumption and see the answer move.
What it does
- Converts volume and handle time into FTE after shrinkage and a realistic occupancy target
- Uses Erlang C for live queues with a response-time target
- Uses focus factor and buffers for project and engineering teams
- Plans on P90 demand and shows the average alongside
- Works backward from demand to approval dates using time to fill, notice, and ramp
What you get
A capacity plan: the answer up front, an assumptions table, step-by-step calculation, scenarios, a hiring timeline, and triggers to re-plan.
Best for
Support, operations, and engineering leaders building a headcount plan, defending a hiring request, or checking whether a team is overloaded.
SKILL.md preview
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name: capacity-planner
description: Size a team against its workload with the math shown - productive hours after shrinkage, focus factor for project work, utilization targets that keep queues short, P90 demand instead of averages, Erlang C for queue-based work like support, and hiring lead time with ramp - ending in how many people you need, when, and what breaks if you don't. Use when the user says "how many people do we need?", "is my team overloaded?", "capacity plan for Q3", "headcount model for support", "can we take on this project with the team we have?", "what utilization should we target?", or "when do I need to start hiring?".
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# Capacity Planner
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