It sounds like the start of a particularly poor joke, but IS there an optimum size for a Capacity Planning team?
This might come down to the heart of the issue for many Capacity experts. Do you want your team to be 100% occupied, or do you want them to be 80% (for the sake of argument) busy so that they can respond to ad-hoc project requests without delays? And is there a 'golden ratio' between the number of services to be managed and the number of planners required?
Sadly, in the author's opinion... No!
Some services are very complex and so crucial to the success of an organisation that they require the dedicated and undiverted attention of a single person. Other services might be so trivial and unchanging that a single person could do 10 or more. So if you can't set the number of people in a team using some global equation, are there at least a set of roles that every team should have?
Yes! (phew... Otherwise what would be the point of this article?)
Every capacity team should have a manager that actually understands the subject matter. This person might be a 'team leader' if that fits into the local organisation tree more appropriately, however the fundamental role still exists. A manager that does not understand the intricacies of what a team of highly specialised analysts are doing and the challenges they face is not going to be able to properly represent them higher up the organisation. Also, many technical analysts are not the most skilled presenters, and therefore a manager that can present this technical work at IT Board level is an absolute must. Having an experienced manager that can be 'hands on' also means that they can cover for periods of sickness, holiday, or unexpected peaks of the team's workload. Any organisation that relies on having a 'generic' manager heading up the capacity team will have to employ an additional 'analyst' to provide this cover and will therefore be wasting money.
Each capacity team will also benefit from have a data analyst. This role can typically be undertaken by a junior member of staff, or by someone that is just starting their career in capacity management (having transferred from a help desk role or similar). This team member will be responsible for ensuring that the capacity toolset is working correctly, and also for ensuring that any regular reporting is delivered according to schedule. They may also extract system, application, and business data from the Capacity Management Information System for use by the technical analysts within the team. In this way, they will gain an appreciation for the requirements of the more experienced analysts within the team, and also free up those analysts time so that they can concentrate on the 'dark arts' of modelling and planning.
The only other essential role within the team will be the capacity analysts/planners/managers. They are the heart of a capacity team, the number of which is completely organisation dependant. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there is no magic formula for working out how many analysts you need. The only truism is that the more that you have, the more responsive they can be to fluctuations in workload and when not responding to new requests the more detailed their work can be on their core services.
So, in summary. A team needs a 'hands on' leader, a 'number crunching' data analyst, and then a number of experts. I have set up capacity management functions in which I have filled all three positions, but once a team grows I have found that this separation of roles is the most effective.