Module 4 — Estimation and Time · Lesson 4.4
Capacity Planning at Workspace Scale
Sprint, quarter, year — and the difference between commitment and intent
~12 min
What you'll learn
- Distinguish the three planning horizons and what each is for
- Run a sprint plan that uses calibrated estimates without inflating commitments
- Build a quarterly plan around p50/p90 ranges, not point numbers
- Use the year horizon to set capacity-shaped strategic bets rather than ambition lists
Planning is the act of comparing what the team wants to do against what the team has time to do, at a chosen horizon. Done well, it produces a credible commitment about the near horizon and a credible direction about the far one. Done poorly, it produces a list of intentions that nobody believes and nobody is held to. This lesson covers the three horizons — sprint, quarter, year — and how Kavanah supports each.
Sprint: the firm horizon
A sprint is the horizon over which the team commits. Whatever you commit at sprint start should ship by sprint end with the same reliability you would expect from any other team commitment — high. Sprint commitments that miss should be the exception, not the rule.
Kavanah's sprint planning surface is the Planning view (/planning). The flow is straightforward: select the candidate tasks, see the rolled-up estimate against the team's available capacity (capacity here is the realistic working-hours number for the sprint, not the theoretical maximum), and commit only if the rollup at p90 fits.
The critical word in that last sentence is p90. Committing at the median means missing half the sprints. Committing at p90 means hitting almost all of them, with the trade-off that you fit slightly less in each sprint than the median rollup would suggest. The right trade-off is to hit consistently — missed sprints are expensive in trust, and the cost of carrying 10% less work per sprint is far less than the cost of intermittent late delivery.
The agent's sprint plan tool will show you both numbers — what fits at median and what fits at p90 — and let you choose which to commit. Choose p90 unless you have a specific reason not to.
Quarter: the planning horizon
The quarter is too long to commit at sprint reliability but short enough that capacity is a real constraint. Quarter plans should be commitments about direction and rough capacity allocation, not about specific tasks.
A good quarter plan answers two questions per project: how much capacity will this project get, and what are the milestones that would tell us we are on track. The capacity allocation is expressed as a range — '20–30% of team capacity for Q3, biased toward the back half' — because reality will move within the quarter.
Kavanah's Portfolio view (/portfolio) is where the quarter plan lives. Each project's charter includes its quarter commitments; the Resources tab shows how those commitments roll up against the team's total. Where the rollup exceeds 100%, you have to make a cut — and the visible rollup makes that cut a conscious decision rather than a quiet overload.
The agent can also help here. Asking the AI agent to draft a quarter plan from the current charter set produces a starting point that fits within capacity by construction; you then edit. This is faster than the standard 'each project lead pitches' meeting, and usually more honest, because the agent's allocation is unforgiving in a way human pitches are not.
Year: the direction horizon
The year is too long to plan in terms of capacity at task or project granularity. Year plans should be about bets, not about commitments. Three to five strategic bets, each tied to the workspace Vision, each with a rough share of the team's annual capacity, each with an explicit Negation of what it is not.
Kavanah doesn't have a dedicated 'year plan' surface — the workspace KVN charter plus the active projects' charters are the artifact. The annual ritual is to revisit the workspace KVN, confirm or change the bets, and reset the project portfolio accordingly. Projects that no longer ladder up to a current bet get closed out, not allowed to drift.
The trap at the year horizon is ambition without negation. Listing eight strategic priorities is the same as listing zero, because the team's actual capacity can serve at most three or four. The discipline is to choose, in advance, the things the team will not pursue — and to write those into the workspace Negation so the rest of the year's conversations have a sharp instrument for filtering opportunities.
Where the three horizons meet
Each horizon is the input to the next. The year sets the bets. The quarter allocates capacity to each bet. The sprint commits specific tasks within the quarter's allocation. The bottom-up signal — actuals from each sprint — feeds back up the chain, recalibrating the quarter's expected output and, over multiple quarters, the year's bets.
The healthy operating cadence is: weekly sprint plan + retro, monthly quarter check-in, annual year reset. Each takes a different amount of time and produces a different artifact. Conflating them — running a sprint plan as if it were a quarter conversation, or vice versa — produces meetings that drag and decisions that nobody owns.
Kavanah's metrics surfaces (/reports, /portfolio, the AI agent's review) all break their views by horizon: this-sprint, this-quarter, this-year. Read each in its own frame and decisions land where they belong.
Run each horizon deliberately
- 1
Build the next sprint at p90 against actual available capacity. Reject the temptation to add 'just one more.'
- 2
Confirm each project has a quarter allocation and a milestone. Sum the allocations; if over 100%, cut.
- 3
Three to five bets, each laddering to the workspace V. Write the explicit N — what you are choosing not to do.
- 4
Build the operating cadence into the calendar
Weekly sprint slot, monthly quarter check-in, annual year reset. Each is a recurring calendar event with a fixed agenda.
Planning health
- Sprint commitment hit rate
- Fraction of committed sprint tasks that ship by sprint end.
- Healthy signal: Above 85%. Below 70% means committing at median, not p90.
- Quarter allocation total
- Sum of project allocations as percentage of total team capacity.
- Healthy signal: 100% or slightly under. Above 100% is implicit overload.
- Year-bet count
- Number of strategic bets in the workspace plan.
- Healthy signal: 3–5. Below 3 may be under-ambitious; above 5 is unwriteable into actual capacity.
- Plan-to-actual drift
- At quarter end, the gap between planned allocation per project and the actual capacity that flowed there.
- Healthy signal: Under 20%. Larger drift means quarter plans are not load-bearing.
Key takeaways
- ·Three horizons: sprint (commit), quarter (allocate), year (bet).
- ·Commit sprints at p90, not median.
- ·Quarter allocations sum to 100% or less. Year bets are 3–5, with explicit negations.
- ·Each horizon feeds the next; conflating them produces decisions nobody owns.
With assignment and estimation in place, the next module turns to the operating cadence — the rituals that hold KVN steady against the noise of the week.