The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Beyond 100%: Why Full Capacity Breaks Teams and What to Do Instead

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Most teams plan to 100% capacity and call it efficiency. In reality, that’s where things start to break.In this episode, I walk through a better way to think about capacity, not as a percentage on a heatmap, but as a balance between people, workload, and real-world unpredictability.You’ll hear how experienced and developing project managers handle workload differently, why not all work should be treated as a project, and how shifting repeatable work back to operational teams can free up meaningful capacity.I also break down the difference between planning for what you know, like PTO, training, and admin work, versus creating space for what you don’t know, like escalations and unexpected priorities that derail even the best plans.This isn’t about tools or systems. It’s about awareness, leadership, and better conversations.If you’re leading projects, programs, or teams, this episode will help you move from tracking utilization to actually improving performance.

I want you to picture a screen. It's a resource heat map, maybe yours, maybe one you've seen a thousand times. You've got two project managers listed right next to each other. Both are sitting in exactly 0.8 FTE. On the screen, they're both calm, steady green. Everything's perfect, right? Then Tuesday happens. I walk into my first 101 of the day with my veteran PM. They've been through the wars. They've seen this specific IT rollout three times. We talk about their 80% allocation and they're breezy. No big deal. For them, that work workload is high octane, but it's sustainable. They're making sharp, quick decisions because they built the muscle memory. Then an hour later, I sit down with my rising star, less experienced PM,

who is also at 80%, but the energy in the room is completely different. Their voice is tight. They're struggling with ambiguity of a new operational pivot. For them, that same 80% isn't just work. It's a time suck that's pulling them toward a burnout cliff. The quick insight here is that emotions don't show up on Gant charts or heat maps. Its leaders, we have to look past the percent to see the person because a 70 percent for a junior PM is often more dangerous than a 90 percent for a veteran. Welcome to the People Process Progress podcast where we talk about how to bring people together, align process, and build progress together. I'm your host, Kevin Pinell, author of The Stability Equation, and the People Process and Progress of Project Management.

To connect with me and learn more, visit peopleprocessprogress.com. If you find this episode helpful, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others. Now let's get started. When we see that red on the heat map, our instinct is usually push harder or ask for more headcount. But when our bench strength truly gets thin, a great leader doesn't just look for more people. What we have to do is look for repetitive wastes, right? So often we can look across our projects, our red ones where folks are just maxed out on their time and ask ourselves and our organization a hard question. Is this actually a project or is it just operational task and decides, right? Does it have a definitive end?

Is it unique? Is it something that really requires that extra project management touch of pulling large amounts of people together and facilitating kind of some detailed things? Right? A lot of folks find that their PM's time is being eaten by repeatable manual processes that don't need a project manager to run them. So that's where we can make a pivot, right?

Work with your IT, operational teams, business folks, to harden those processes. Use your project manager's skill in building process and bringing people together and making progress, right, to help those teams do the same thing, hard them, document them, and then make them repeatable, right? Turn them into templates for hardware or business or software or whatever. Then they can own it themselves and just keep rolling down the road.

Right? Because it's hard to hire our way out of a capacity crisis, right? What we can do, though, is get back our project managers and program managers time and we need their strategic thinking and that's hugely valuable. So recoup some capacity by moving the work to where it actually belongs or where it's owned as opposed to maybe your PMO or your program manager, your portfolio management, doing that for operational people. There's a famous thing in aviation called the flight envelope, and it was made famous by pilots

like Chuck Yeager. Every plane has one. It's a mathematical limit of how fast or how high that aircraft can safely fly. A seasoned pilot knows how far they can push the envelope right before the wings are going to start to vibrate. They can fly right up to the edge. They can feel the machine. and that's like our veteran PM, right, at 90%.

They've been there. But a student pilot, they can lose control at the same plane, even flying well within the safe limits if the conditions get too complex. That's your junior PM just at 70%. And your heat map is that flight envelope, right? If you fly your team at the absolute edges

of those limits every single day, eventually you're going to have a structural failure. You have to know the limits of the pilot, not just the plane. So how do we apply this Monday morning? Go to your heat map and whatever tool you're using and look for the less experienced team members. If they're over 70%, schedule a one-on-one if you don't already have one scheduled. But don't ask about the status of the project. Ask about the weight of it.

Find out if they feel like they're flying or if they're just hanging on. Second, look for the handoff, right? Find one project on your list that feels like a repeatable task. Can you build a workflow so an app team or a business team or somebody else can own it? give that 10% back to your PM to do the higher level work that they were hired for. Finally, lead from the front. It's the glue of our leadership. If you're sitting in a 101 and a team member expresses burnout and there's nowhere left to move the work, that's when we have to step in.

Sometimes the point one FTE that saves a project and saves a person is the director or the manager stepping in, rolling up their sleeves and taking a piece of the load. Resource management is in a math problem. It's a trust problem. problem. Use the day to start the conversation, but use your one-on-ones to save your team. Thank you for spending this time with me on People Process Progress. If today's episode helped you, share it with someone who could use it too. For more, check out my two books, the stability equation, seven pillars for a more balanced life, and the People Process and Progress

of Project Management. Both are available now on Amazon and Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover formats. You can also find more conversations, lessons, and short videos on the People Process Progress YouTube channel and follow me on X and Instagram at Pinell KG. And of course, keep tuning in here to the People Process Progress podcast where together we keep building balanced lives, stronger teams, and better outcomes. Until next time, own your mind, move your body, anchor your spirit, and Godspeed, y'all.