TL;DR
Capacity Planning is an essential part of planning in Craft.io. This guide gives you a clear overview of the concept so you can understand how capacity works in both the Workspace and the Portfolio.
🎬 Watch: Quick overview of Capacity Planning in the Workspace
Once you understand the basics, you will be ready to plan confidently, whether you manage a single product area or coordinate multiple teams across your organization.
What is Capacity Planning?
Capacity Planning helps you understand what your teams can realistically complete within a specific timeframe. It takes a broad list of ideas for the time period and refines it into a clear, achievable plan.
Craft.io brings together three ingredients that make this possible:
The capacity of your teams, functions, or individuals
The effort required for each work item
The timeframe you are planning against
When you combine these inputs, Craft.io instantly shows whether your plan fits inside your available capacity. This gives you clarity, supports meaningful trade-off discussions, and removes guesswork.
💡Tip: Start with clean capacity and effort values. Accurate inputs make every trade off clearer and your final plan far more reliable.
Where Capacity Planning lives in Craft.io
Capacity Planning can be used in two places - the Workspace, and the Portfolio. Both levels follow the same planning principles, helping you to commit to plans that your teams can deliver.
Workspace Capacity Planning helps teams validate whether their Epics, Features, or Stories can fit into a specific cadence. It is perfect for planning inside a single product area or delivery team.
Portfolio Capacity Planning provides a broader picture that spans multiple workspaces or product lines. It is ideal when you need to understand shared capacity, cross team dependencies, and the feasibility of large initiatives.
💡Tip: Use Workspace Capacity Planning to fine tune delivery commitments, then validate those decisions in the Portfolio view to catch cross team constraints early.
How to create a new Capacity Planning view:
Click New View (this can also be accessed via the 'Create' button in the top right corner).
Select Capacity Planning View, which will open up a view using your default cadence.
Define your item hierarchy, time frame and filters, and save the view for your team via the Actions > Save as a New Workspace (or Portfolio) View.
When you open a Capacity Planning view in your Workspace, you will see your work items grouped by planning cadences, such as Quarters and Sprints, according to your chosen item hierarchy (e.g. Epic, Feature, Story).
💡Tip: Create custom time frames to plan at multiple levels, such as Years, Half Years, Trimesters, PIs, Monthly or beyond. You can also change the hierarchy to plan at the level that suits your team; Epics work well for high level planning, whilst Features and Stories support more granular planning.
How to create your capacity planning fields
Each capacity field represents a team or function such as Frontend, Backend, or QA, and each carries the available capacity for the chosen timeframe.
To create a Capacity Planning field:
Open your Workspace Settings and click Custom Fields
Click Add Custom Field and select Number
Name your capacity field
Toggle on Connect to Capacity Planning
Click Create
💡Tip: You can also use Date Alignment Automation Rules to align dates to your chosen time cadence. Go to Workspace Settings > Automation Rules > Date Alignment.
How to set net capacity for your time frame
Net capacity represents the true amount of time that a team, pod, or individual has available in a given planning period. It takes into account working days, team size, and any buffers for holidays, sickness, meetings, or production work. Setting this correctly ensures that Craft.io can tell you whether your plan is realistic.
Follow these steps to assign net capacity in the Workspace. In this example, we have a team of 3 Front End Engineers, with 60 days available for the time period per resource:
Click on the relevant Capacity field in the Capacity Planning view
Enter Capacity per Person (this can be anything - hours, days, weeks etc)
Define the Number of People
Assign a percentage buffer
Do the same for your other teams, functions or users
💡Tip: The way you measure effort is flexible and can align to your preferred ways of working; this could be hours, days, weeks, or beyond. Simply enter your net capacity and effort values, and you'll see the numbers aggregate.
Capacity planning modes
Teams evaluate capacity in different ways. Sometimes you need a complete view of everything planned for a timeframe. Other times, you want to focus on a specific product area, Epic, or team. Capacity Planning modes control how effort and capacity are calculated, allowing you to easily shift between high level planning and focused decision making.
Include all items in summation
Resource summation will include all items of the release/sprint, even those filtered out. Use this option when you want to verify that you aren't exceeding the overall capacity, even if you are focusing on specific items.
Exclude filtered out items from summation
Resource summation will include only items that are currently visible on the table. Use this option when you want to see the sum of items of a specific product or hierarchy level.
Exclude filtered out items from summation and capacity
Resource summation will include only items that are currently visible on the table, and capacity value will not include items not shown on the table. Use this option when you want to match the resources of the visible items with the remaining capacity.
You can switch between modes from the View Settings in the Capacity Planning view.
💡Tip: Start with Include all items in summation to understand total demand, then switch modes as you narrow focus. This keeps big picture feasibility clear before making local trade offs.
Scenario planning and prioritization
Once you have assigned effort values to your work items, you can begin modeling your plan by toggling items in or out of scope. Use the blue toggles in the Out/In column to simulate different scenarios and see how adding, removing, or shifting items affects the overall plan. Each change updates the capacity view instantly so you can test scope, review trade offs, and understand the impact on each team.
Craft.io compares the total effort of the items you have toggled in scope with the net capacity you set for the time frame, whilst color-coded capacity bars show you whether each team is within limits or overloaded. Green means the plan is comfortably within capacity, red indicates you are approaching the limit, and dark red highlights significant over allocation that may require action.
💡Tip: you can also sort or filter your items using prioritization fields such as RICE, MoSCoW, or WSJF. This helps surface the highest value work, so when capacity becomes tight, you can clearly see which items should remain in scope and which ones can move to a later cadence.
Finalizing your plan
Once you are satisfied with the scenario you have modeled, click Apply in the Out/In column to confirm your scope. Items that were toggled out of scope can be moved to a later cadence or back to the backlog, depending on your selection, whilst items toggled in will remain in the active plan.
Note that marking an item as ‘Out’ does not remove it from your Craft.io release; it simply deducts it from the capacity calculation while you are in the capacity planning view. Make sure to click Apply to finalize any changes you've made.
This finalizes your capacity aligned scope for the period. From here, you can move into your delivery views such as the Timeline, Swimlanes Roadmap, or Kanban to schedule work, track progress, and guide your teams through execution.
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