Why I Still Use Spreadsheets for Capacity Planning

I have tried dedicated capacity planning tools. Resource Guru, Forecast, Float, the resource management modules in Jira and Azure DevOps. They all have the same problem: they impose a model of capacity that does not match how my teams actually work.

Spreadsheets are ugly. They require manual updates. They have no integrations. And they are still the best tool I have found for capacity planning across distributed teams.

Flexibility Is the Feature

Every team I manage has a different structure. One has a dedicated QA engineer. Another does not. One has a part-time designer shared with two other squads. Another has a contractor who is only available three days a week. No off-the-shelf tool handles all of these configurations without significant customization.

A spreadsheet handles them in five minutes. I add a column, adjust a formula, and move on. When the team structure changes, I update the sheet. I do not file a feature request.

My Template

My capacity planning spreadsheet has four sections. Team roster with availability percentages. Sprint calendar with holidays and leave marked. Capacity calculation that multiplies available days by a focus factor. And a comparison row showing planned story points against calculated capacity.

It takes me twenty minutes to update before each sprint. That is time well spent because the output directly feeds sprint planning. The team trusts the numbers because they can see the math.

When to Graduate

If you are managing more than four teams, spreadsheets start to break down. At that scale, you need a system of record with dashboards and aggregated views. But for one to three teams, a spreadsheet is faster to build, easier to maintain, and more transparent than any tool I have used.

Do not let tool vendors convince you that you need their product to do basic math. Master the fundamentals in a spreadsheet first. Then you will know exactly what to require when you do evaluate tools.