GenEarth · Capacity planning
A team of two found they'd planned 164 more hours than they had, and chose what to drop.
What they asked for
Two people delivering environmental education workshops in London schools. They planned carefully, and it still felt chaotic. They wanted to understand why, and to get "far more realistic about what a team of two can actually take on".
What was actually going on
The planning was all there: goals, regular reflection, and a workshop tracker with seventeen sheets and over six hundred checkpoints. The problem was that nothing told them what was due this week, so someone had to remember to go and look. Underneath that, two people were covering about four roles' worth of work between them.
What we built
Five working sessions, each with pre-work, so time together went on decisions rather than gathering information. A fifteen-step map of how a workshop gets organised, showing what's manual and where things get stuck. An audit of their tools, which found two project systems and no CRM. And a capacity model comparing the hours they really had over twelve weeks with every piece of planned work.
What changed
The model showed roughly 323 hours of available time against 487 hours of planned work. Within a fortnight, the founder had cut the curriculum estimate, dropped a project, reduced her own meetings and named the two things that mattered most. The gap is now about 103 hours. It's still a gap, and I'd rather it were honest than closed on paper. The point was never the number. It was to make the trade-offs visible so they could choose.