Capacity Planning: Demand, Resources and Productivity [EN]

What you'll learn

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• Forecast demand with methods that hold up rather than with last year plus ten percent

• Run a gap analysis between the capacity you need and the capacity you have

• Find where capacity is actually lost: bottlenecks, queues, idle time, context switching

• Design operating rhythms that synchronise teams instead of filling calendars

• Turn "we need more people" into a number somebody can approve

• Build a budget linked to strategy, and calculate the return on it

• Analyse workload with regression and forecasting rather than with impressions

• Recover individual capacity through prioritisation, delegation and time blocking

• Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries

• Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank

Who this course is for:

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• Operations leaders balancing incoming demand against a fixed team
• Managers who have asked for headcount and been asked for evidence
• Function heads whose team is permanently busy and permanently behind
• Planning and finance specialists building capacity models
• Founders deciding whether the constraint is people, process or priorities
• Team leads whose calendar filled up as the company grew
• Anyone whose answer to overload has so far been working longer

Description

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This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Capacity is not how many people you have. It is how much work they can absorb without quality dropping, and almost nobody measures the distance between those two numbers.

Why "we need more people" rarely gets approved

Because it arrives as a feeling. The team is visibly overloaded, everyone agrees, and then finance asks how much work is actually arriving, how long each type takes, and what the current utilisation is — and there is no answer. So nothing happens, the team stays overloaded, and six months later someone leaves and the capacity problem becomes a hiring problem at a worse moment. I have made that request and been unable to answer the second question.

What this course actually covers

Five blocks. First, the arithmetic: employee types and full-time equivalents, demand forecasting from extrapolation through to Delphi, job design and workload norming, and the gap analysis between what you need and what you have. Second, the operating layer, which is where capacity is genuinely lost — bottlenecks, queues, idle time, context switching, unsynchronised teams and meetings that became a ritual. Third, measurement: segmentation, lifetime value, funnels, correlation, multiple regression and forecasting, so an impression becomes a number. Fourth, the money: linking a budget to strategy, calculating return, and budgeting payroll, hiring, learning and automation. Fifth, individual capacity — prioritisation, delegation, time blocking, and finding where the hours actually went.

A note on the material

Twenty-two of the thirty-six lessons use workforce planning and workforce budgeting as their material. That is the core of the subject rather than a substitute for it: in any organisation built on knowledge work, capacity is people and payroll is the largest line in the budget. The apparatus is general — gap analysis, the theory of constraints, regression, forecasting and return calculations do not care what you are planning.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, planning capacity through a period of very fast growth, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 36 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: full-time equivalent calculations, demand forecasting methods, gap analysis, the constraint and waste checklist, regression and forecasting, the budget structure and return calculation

• Practical work on your own numbers rather than on a case study

Where to start

Take one week and record how many pieces of work arrived, how many were finished, and how long each type took. That single table answers the question finance asks, and most teams have never built it. Enrol now and start today.