Capacity planning for distributed teams
Working days are a practical capacity input when teams operate across countries, but they are only one part of a credible delivery forecast.
A team in California and a team in India may work toward the same milestone while losing different weekdays to public holidays. The planner makes that difference visible, then lets you adjust for team size, availability, focus factor, and the days both teams can work together.
A useful capacity sequence
- Set the planning-increment start and end dates.
- Add every participating team and select its country calendar.
- Reduce availability for planned leave, training, support, and other commitments.
- Use the focus factor to represent the portion of available time expected to go to planned delivery work.
- Review each team’s holidays, shared delivery days, and daily core-hours overlap.
- Compare the resulting person-days with the team’s own historical delivery data.
Why person-days are not story points
Person-days describe an available-time assumption. Story points are a relative estimate created by a particular team. Two teams can have the same number of person-days and deliver different story-point totals because their work mix, experience, interruptions, and estimation practices differ.
Shared delivery and overlap
The planner’s shared-delivery count identifies dates that are working days in every selected country calendar. Its core-hours estimate uses the UTC offsets and local core hours you enter. It is a coordination signal, not a promise that every engineer is available for every meeting or handoff.
What to add before committing to a date
- Company shutdowns and floating holidays
- Individual leave and part-time schedules
- Production support and incident rotations
- Planning, review, security, and release work
- Dependencies on customers, vendors, or teams in other calendars
Use the capacity planner to model the dates, then record the assumptions with the project plan. Last reviewed: October 2026.