Published 9 October 2026
Ask most agencies whether the team is overbooked and the answer comes from a feeling, or from a resource sheet where everyone sits at 100% and nobody can say whether that is healthy. A person booked for every contracted hour isn't fully utilised. They're overbooked, because the plan has already spent time they don't have.
The fix isn't a better tool. It's one change in what you count, bookable hours instead of contracted hours, and one change in how you look at it: the whole team by week, not one project at a time.
A 37.5 hour contract doesn't give you 37.5 hours of project time. Team meetings, timesheets, internal reviews, pitches, training and a share of holidays and sickness all come out first. Someone who loses 7.5 hours a week to that has 30 bookable hours, and that is the number every booking should be measured against.
Your own figure will differ. Track it for a month before you trust a guess, and keep it per person, because a producer and a developer rarely lose the same amount.
Once you have bookable hours, utilisation is simple: hours booked in a week, divided by hours available. Three bands are enough to start with.
› Above 100%: overbooked
The plan needs hours that don't exist. Something slips, someone works evenings, or quality quietly drops.
› 80% to 100%: full
Fine for a short stretch. There's no room for the review round that runs long or the sick day nobody planned for.
› Below 60%: underused
Either there's space for new work, or the bookings are out of date. Both are worth knowing.
Treat 80% as a sensible target to start from and the other two lines as your first guess. Move them once you have a few weeks of real data.
Utilisation for one week, example team. Person A is the only one over the line, but Person B has no room either.
Take a four person team in the week commencing 2 November. Everyone has a contracted week, a deduction for non project time, and the bookings that overlap that week.
| Person | Contracted | Non project | Bookable | Booked | Utilisation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Person A | 37.5 | 7.5 | 30 | 37 | 123% |
| Person B | 37.5 | 5 | 32.5 | 32 | 98% |
| Person C | 37.5 | 5 | 32.5 | 25 | 77% |
| Person D | 30 | 5 | 25 | 15 | 60% |
Hours per week. Bookable is contracted minus non project time.
Person A is booked on three projects at 15, 12 and 10 hours. Each project was planned on its own and each ask looks reasonable. Added together it's 37 hours against 30 bookable. Nobody saw it because nobody was looking at Person A across all three. The 10 hour booking is a provisional campaign that hasn't been signed yet, which is the useful part: the clash shows up before the contract does, while there's still time to move a start date or put someone else on it.
Person B looks fine at 98% and has no slack at all. One extended review round and something moves. Person D has space to take on work, and without the whole team on one page that fact stays invisible.
This week is mostly decided. The next four weeks is where you can still act: move a start date, swap a person, bring in a freelancer, or tell a client the answer is not yet. Twelve weeks out shows whether a pattern is forming, such as three launches landing in the same fortnight.
Check the team total as well as the individuals. A team that looks comfortable at 80% overall can hide two people at 120% and two at 40%.
Planning by project instead of by person. A project plan can be perfectly sensible and still put someone in three places. Capacity is a view across projects, so it needs one list of people with every booking against their name.
Using contracted hours. It makes everyone look available when they aren't. Start from bookable hours and the numbers stop flattering you.
Leaving out the pipeline. If provisional work isn't in the plan, a signed contract becomes the first time anyone sees the clash. Add it early, mark it provisional, and switch it off to see the confirmed picture.
Updating it monthly. A plan that is three weeks old is worse than no plan, because it gives you confidence you haven't earned. Ten minutes on a Monday is enough.
Treating it as the PM's problem alone. The plan only works if account directors and heads of department check it before they agree dates with clients.
List the team and work out each person's bookable hours. Add every current booking with a first week and a last week, then add pipeline work as provisional. Set your thresholds. After that, spend ten minutes each Monday updating changes and looking at the next four weeks. Before anyone says yes to new work, add it as a provisional booking and see who turns red.
A resource plan that shows everyone at 100% isn't telling you the team is efficient. It's telling you the plan has no room in it.
The Capacity Planning System template works this way in Google Sheets. It has a Team tab for bookable hours, a Bookings log, a 12 week Capacity grid, and a Dashboard that shows team utilisation, who is overbooked and how many spare hours you have. It's in the PM Hub vault now. Want it, and the other frameworks that make delivery less chaotic, as they ship?
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