I run a number of Capacity Planning projects for small businesses. It's really not economically feasible for them to determine all of their constraints to the nth degree, so I usually start with two figures: What is their perfect world, 100% Capacity / utilisation rate? And then what happens if we subtract 20-30% of that for 'Uncontrollables' and use that as the Real World target.
There's a bit more science behind it than just that, but the end result proves accurate and practical. Losing 20% doesn't sound like much, until you realise that's 1 day per week for every full time employee that we conclude will never be efficient for any decent length of time.
There's a bit more science behind it than just that, but the end result proves accurate and practical. Losing 20% doesn't sound like much, until you realise that's 1 day per week for every full time employee that we conclude will never be efficient for any decent length of time.