Agency resource planning: how to plan your team’s capacity

Start with real capacity

Capacity is the time each person actually has for client work, not the hours in their contract. A designer contracted for 40 hours a week doesn’t have 40 hours to book. Some of that week goes on internal meetings, admin, training, new business and the small tasks that keep an agency running.

Work out a realistic weekly figure for each person and plan against that. It will feel lower than you’d like, which is the point. Plans built on contracted hours look fine on paper and fall apart by Wednesday.

• Holidays, public holidays and planned time off.
• Regular internal meetings and one-to-ones.
• Admin, timesheets and email.
• New business and pitch work.
• Training, reviews and team time.
• A buffer for the urgent requests that always arrive.

Projects and retainers need different planning

Project work has a defined scope and timeline. You estimate the hours, spread them across the weeks of the project and expect peaks around key moments such as first concepts and final artwork. The risk is that several projects peak in the same week.

Retainer work is steadier but harder to see. A client pays a fixed monthly fee for an ongoing relationship, and the requests arrive in a stream of small jobs. Because nothing is booked as a project, retainer work often isn’t planned at all, and it quietly eats into the time you thought was free.

A practical approach is to reserve a regular weekly allocation for each retainer client, sized from what the fee covers, and book project work around it. Then review each month whether the retainer is using more time than the fee allows. If it consistently is, that is a commercial conversation to have with the client, not something the team should simply absorb.

Utilisation in plain terms

Utilisation is the share of a person’s available time spent on client work. If someone has 35 available hours in a week and spends 28 of them on client work, their utilisation is 80%. Some agencies measure all client work, others only billable time, so be clear which you mean.

It is a planning measure, not a productivity score. Low utilisation might mean there isn’t enough work, or that someone is carrying a lot of internal responsibility. High utilisation might look efficient, but a team booked close to 100% has no room for the urgent request, the extra feedback round or the sick day, and it tends to show in late nights and rushed work.

Expect different levels for different roles. People who spend most of their day on client work, such as designers and copywriters, will naturally be higher than leaders who also manage people, clients and the business.

Booking people week by week

Once you know capacity, book people against it. Start from the estimate: if a project includes 20 hours of design in its second week, book those hours to a named designer on specific days. A booking makes the plan visible to the person doing the work and to everyone who might want their time.

Plan the next two to four weeks in detail and the months beyond more loosely. Further ahead, the aim isn’t precision but early warning: seeing that a big launch will need two designers in March while there’s still time to arrange it.

• Book by person and day, not just by team or month.
• Mark bookings as tentative until the work is confirmed.
• Give one person ownership of the plan, so changes don’t conflict.
• Hold a short weekly planning check to review the coming weeks.
• Update the plan when work moves, rather than keeping changes in people’s heads.

Spotting overload early

Overload rarely announces itself. It shows up first in small signals, often a week or two before a deadline slips. The earlier you see them, the more options you have: moving a date, sharing the work, bringing in a freelancer or agreeing a reduced scope with the client.

• Someone is booked above their weekly availability.
• Several projects rely on the same person in the same week.
• Unplanned retainer requests keep pushing booked work back.
• Timesheets show regular evening or weekend hours.
• Internal reviews are being skipped to save time.
• The same person is always the answer to “who can pick this up?”

Review plan against actual time

A plan is a forecast, and forecasts improve when you check them. Each week, compare what people were booked to do with the time they actually logged. Each month, compare project hours with the estimate and the budget, and retainer hours with what the fee covers.

The point isn’t to catch anyone out. It is to learn. If concept development regularly takes longer than estimated, your next estimates should reflect that. If one client’s retainer always overruns, you have the evidence for a conversation about scope.

Simplr Plus brings this together: book time by person and day, compare allocations with weekly availability, and compare project hours with planned hours and budgets.