How many hours does this sprint really have?

What the number assumes

The focus factor covers meetings, support, code review, interruptions and the work that appears mid-sprint. Teams that measure it usually land between 55% and 75%. Guessing 100% is how a sprint is planned to fail on day one.

The formula defines the arithmetic. It does not define your business. A figure from this page is a starting point for a decision rather than the decision.

How to calculate what a team can actually take on

Plannable capacity is the number of people, multiplied by the working days in the sprint, multiplied by hours in a day, multiplied by a focus factor. The first three are facts. The fourth is the only interesting one, and it is the difference between a plan and a wish.

The focus factor is the share of paid hours that reaches the planned work. It is never 100 per cent and it is not supposed to be. The remainder is code review, support, interviews, the conversation that unblocked somebody else, and everything else that has to happen for the planned work to be possible.

Measuring your own focus factor

Take the hours the team actually spent on sprint items and divide by the hours theoretically available. Do it for three sprints and use the average. That number is worth more than any published benchmark because it describes your team, your interruptions and your definition of done.

It is remarkably stable once measured, which is what makes it useful. A team whose focus factor moves sharply is telling you something changed, usually an increase in support load or a reorganisation, and that is a signal worth reading rather than a number to correct.

Why planning at full capacity fails

A sprint planned at 100 per cent has no room for the thing that always happens. When it does, something has to give, and what gives is either the sprint goal or the quality of what was delivered, usually the second, because it is less visible.

The pattern repeats and compounds. Work carried over inflates the next sprint before it starts, which makes the next overcommitment worse. Two or three rounds of this and the plan has stopped describing anything, which is a much more expensive problem than being slightly conservative.

What capacity does not tell you

It says nothing about sequence or dependency. A team with ample capacity can still deliver nothing if everything is waiting on one person or one decision, and no capacity figure will show that. Availability and the critical path are different questions and need to be looked at separately.

It also says nothing about whether the work is worth doing. Capacity planning answers how much, and only how much. What to fill it with is the harder question, and the calculator is deliberately silent on it.

Capacity when people are shared between teams

A person split across two teams does not deliver half to each. Context switching takes a real toll, and the usual planning assumption, that a 50 per cent allocation yields half a person, is optimistic by a wide margin. Planning such a person at 35 to 40 per cent per team is closer to what actually happens.

The effect compounds with the number of contexts. Someone on three teams is often contributing meaningfully to none of them, and the fix is organisational rather than arithmetic: fewer simultaneous commitments per person, not a better estimate of the split.

If the split cannot be avoided, put it in the capacity figure rather than hoping for it. A sprint planned as though a shared person were fully present will miss, and the miss will be blamed on the work rather than on the plan.

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