Beyond the Call Center: A Guide to Capacity and Occupancy Planning for Support Teams

How to Assess Your Team’s Capacity and Occupancy for Support (and Why It Matters)

In IT Service Management (ITSM), understanding the capacity and occupancy of support teams is crucial, especially when those teams don’t operate within the traditional call center model. Many organizations have teams like Managed Services (1st Level) or Application Support, where determining these metrics isn’t as straightforward. In this blog, we’ll explore how to assess these factors for non-call center support teams and why these metrics matter from both a team wellbeing and business perspective.

Why Understand Capacity and Occupancy?

Capacity and occupancy are not just operational metrics; they directly impact your team’s effectiveness, morale, and resource planning. Let’s break down why these two metrics are so important.

1. Team Wellbeing

Adopting a “people-first” approach means actively monitoring your team’s workload to ensure a balanced distribution. If your team is underutilized, they may experience boredom or disengagement, which can hurt morale and productivity. On the other hand, if they’re overloaded, burnout becomes a real risk. Striking the right balance is key to keeping your team healthy and motivated.

• Too little work: Results in disengagement, lack of motivation, and possibly higher turnover.

• Too much work: Leads to fatigue, decreased quality of work, and eventually burnout.

  
  

Understanding your team’s capacity helps maintain this balance, ensuring they have enough work to stay engaged but not so much that it overwhelms them.

2. Budget and Resource Allocation

Knowing the capacity and occupancy of your support teams allows you to make informed decisions regarding budget allocation. If workloads are consistently above capacity, it may be time to request additional resources, whether through hiring more staff or investing in automation to handle routine tasks. On the flip side, if resources aren’t being fully utilized, you may be able to optimize your budget by redeploying staff to other areas of the business.

3. Effective Resourcing and Optimization

When you understand your team’s capacity, you can more effectively plan resource allocation. Are there areas where team members can be redeployed to other tasks or projects to balance the workload? Or perhaps automation or process improvements—like value stream mapping—can help reduce unnecessary workload and improve efficiency.

When teams are at or near capacity, it’s also an opportunity to evaluate whether tools or processes (such as automated workflows) can help lighten the load, thereby preventing the need for additional headcount or budget increases.

4. Strategic Planning and Forecasting

Understanding your team’s capacity and occupancy is essential when it comes to planning for upcoming projects or support periods. With this data, you can ensure resource availability aligns with business objectives, whether that means scaling up support during an anticipated busy period or reallocating resources during lulls.

How to Assess Capacity and Occupancy for Non-Traditional Support Teams

For traditional contact center models, calculating capacity and occupancy is relatively straightforward (e.g., number of agents, number of calls, etc.). However, for Managed Services or Application Support teams, the metrics need to be customized to the specific nature of their work.

Here's an outline of how you can calculate these metrics for non-traditional teams:

• Capacity: This refers to the total amount of work your team can handle, typically measured in person-hours or work units. For non-call center teams, this may mean estimating the time it takes to resolve different types of tickets, incidents, or requests.

• Occupancy: Occupancy is the proportion of time spent on productive work versus idle time. For application support teams, this could involve measuring the time spent on actual support tasks (like troubleshooting or resolving tickets) versus time spent on administrative tasks, meetings, or idle time.

Formula for Capacity & Occupancy:

1. Capacity = Total available hours of support team per week - non - productive time

   For example in my teams context :

   • Total Available Hours = Contracted weekly hours (37.5)

   • Non-Productive Time includes:

     • Annual leave

     • Public holidays

     • Internal meetings (not client-related)

     • Admin time

     • Training

       
       

2. Occupancy = (Time spent on productive work / Capacity (total available work time)) * 100

   For example in my teams context :

   • Productive Work includes:

     • Ticket handling

     • Client calls/meetings

     • Project work

     • Incident management

     • Other customer-facing tasks

While precise formulas may vary based on the specific tasks and types of support provided by your teams, understanding how to measure capacity and occupancy within the context of your operations is key. In the absence of historical data, you can also look to industry averages to benchmark performance.

💡Tip: I suggest using a spreadsheet or Power BI to document and calculate this data for your teams, facilitating easier analysis and decision-making.

Conclusion

Understanding your team’s capacity and occupancy—especially in teams outside of the traditional contact center model—is not always straightforward. However, even without 100% accuracy, these metrics provide invaluable insights that help you make informed, evidence-based decisions. Whether you're managing team wellbeing, optimizing budget, or planning for future growth, these metrics are vital for ensuring your support teams remain productive, efficient, and happy.

While the numbers may not always be precise, they give you a data-driven foundation to build upon, enabling you to forecast more effectively, manage resources better, and ultimately provide better service to your customers.