# Manage Team Capacity and Priorities

Status: draft · v0.1.0 · Manager System
draft reference — not a fitted standard

Match authorized demand to real team capacity through explicit priorities, work-in-process limits, tradeoffs, commitments, and escalation.

## Purpose
Protect the most important work and the people and systems performing it by making demand, capacity, constraints, and consequences visible before commitments are made.

## Steps
1. Frame the decision horizon — Define what capacity and priority decision must be made and for what period.
2. Make demand and current work visible — Create one demand picture before accepting or sequencing more work.
3. Estimate usable capacity and constraints — Describe what the complete operating system can responsibly deliver.
4. Prioritize work and form feasible options — Make value, obligation, timing, risk, effort, and system effects comparable.
5. Decide and authorize commitments — Choose a feasible plan and make rejected or displaced demand explicit.
6. Operate and adjust the plan — Protect flow while responding to evidence and changed conditions.
7. Review outcomes and improve capacity design — Use forecast and operating evidence to improve work, systems, and future decisions.

## Connections
- upstream: Run the Team Operating Cadence (/processes/run-team-operating-cadence) — trigger: The cadence identifies a capacity or priority decision.
- upstream: Establish the Manager Operating Role (/processes/establish-manager-operating-role) — trigger: The manager charter launches or changes.
- downstream: Enable Decisions and Escalation (/processes/enable-decisions-and-escalation) — trigger: A required tradeoff exceeds chartered authority or crosses an escalation threshold.
- downstream: Approve Workforce Need and Headcount (/processes/approve-workforce-need) — trigger: Evidence indicates a durable gap requiring a workforce response decision.
- downstream: Redesign Work and Workflow (/processes/redesign-work-and-workflow) — trigger: Capacity review identifies work or process design as a material cause.
- downstream: Review Manager-System Health (/processes/review-manager-system-health) — trigger: The manager-system review point or material signal occurs.

## Measures
- Commitment-plan operating fit: Combined review of outcome delivery, quality, reliability, flow, displaced work, workload, and guardrails; not utilization or volume alone.
- Demand and capacity evidence completeness: Material commitments satisfying required demand and capacity fields divided by all material commitments.
- Priority work flow time and reliability: Elapsed-time distribution and commitment reliability for accepted priority work, with wait, rework, and interruption separated where useful.
- Authorized-plan use: Applicable work linked to the active plan or authorized change divided by all applicable work.
- Demand and capacity variance pattern: Material variances by source, type, work class, constraint, cause status, impact, and disposition.
- Workload, safety, quality, maintenance, learning, and fairness guardrail: Context-specific review of workload, overtime, recovery, safety, quality, maintenance, learning, voice, and workforce evidence; not a causal or legal conclusion.