Capacity Planning When Half the Team Is Part Time

Capacity planning breaks when half the team is part time because fractional days do not add up the way a spreadsheet suggests. Two people at three days a week are not one and a bit full time people. They are two separate calendars, two sets of context switching costs, and two chances that the person you need is not there on the day you need them.

The rule that fixes most of it: plan around the days people are present, not the total number of days available. A team of five with fourteen combined days a week is not fourteen days of capacity. It is whatever can be done on the specific days those fourteen fall.

Why the arithmetic misleads

A full time person carries their own context from Monday to Friday. Someone working Monday, Tuesday and Thursday loses and rebuilds that context twice a week. That is not a criticism of part time work. It is a cost of any gap, and full time people pay it too after a holiday.

The second issue is overlap. If your three day people work Monday to Wednesday and your other three day people work Wednesday to Friday, the whole team is together for one day. Anything needing a real conversation queues for that day, and that day becomes a meeting. A few hours of overlap is plenty if it is spent on the right things.

The third is dependency. Work that passes from one person to another used to wait hours. Now it can wait four days, and nobody notices because each person's own week looks busy.

Plan the days, not the totals

Start by drawing the week and marking who is in on each day. Not who is employed. Who is in.

Then ask three questions of the picture:

• Which day has the fewest people, and what must never be scheduled to land there?
• Where is the longest possible wait if work passes from person A to person B?
• Which single day, if it went missing, would stall the most?

That last one usually finds a hidden fragility: one person's one overlapping day carrying all the decisions.

Fix the shape before you fix the volume

Most part time teams are trying to solve a capacity problem when they have a shape problem. Before hiring more hours, try moving the hours you already have.

• Nudge working days so that overlap is two days rather than one, if the people involved are willing
• Put the handoff heavy work at the start of someone's week, not the end
• Give one part time person a full ownership area rather than a slice of three
• Stop splitting a single decision across two people who are never in on the same day

Ownership is the strongest lever. A person at three days a week who owns something completely is far more productive than one at four days who owns fragments of other people's work and has to wait to ask about all of them. New joiners feel those gaps first, which is why they take longer than expected in remote teams.

Shared roles and two managers

Some people are split between two teams or two managers. There is a way to do that without halving their output, but it needs both sides to agree the split. This is where planning quietly fails, because each manager plans as if they have most of the person. Both are right about their own half and wrong about the total.

Two rules keep this honest. First, the split has to be written down in days, not percentages, and both managers have to have seen the same sentence. "Two days with support, three days with the platform team" is checkable. "About 40 percent" is not. Second, one of the two managers has to be the tie breaker when a week goes wrong, and that should be decided before it goes wrong rather than during.

Buffer, and be specific about why

Plan part time teams with more slack than full time ones, and say what the slack is for. It covers the extra handoffs, the waiting days, and the fact that one person's sick day removes a third of their week rather than a fifth. Plan to the days you are confident about and treat anything above that as upside.

Where the records need to agree

None of this works if leave, working patterns and project ownership live in different systems. A project board that shows a task due Friday, when the owner does not work Fridays and is also on leave the week after, is not a planning tool. It is a source of confident wrong answers.

That is what SicherOne is built around: project management and HR on one set of records, so a board knows who is on leave and who works which days rather than treating everyone as a uniform five day resource. AI agents in the same workspace read from those same records, and a person approves anything an agent produces before it goes anywhere.

The one page worth keeping

Draw the week. Mark who is in. Mark the overlap. Write the three riskiest handoffs underneath. Update it whenever someone's pattern changes.

That single page will catch more planning problems than any velocity number, because it describes the thing that actually constrains a part time team: not how many hours exist, but when they exist and whether they exist at the same time as somebody else's.