Built a Clear Capacity Plan to Balance Workload and Reduce Burnout
Gained efficiency and created new 5 person team
The Challenge
When I joined Dell’s Experience Design Group, the team was managing more than 100 active projects across multiple directors. The work moved fast, and priorities shifted constantly, especially in the consumer-facing portfolio. Designers were stretched thin, deadlines were tight, and the group often had to bring in outside contractors to keep up. It was expensive and unsustainable.
To make things even more difficult, each director tracked projects differently. There was no shared view of who was working on what, how much capacity was available, or where tradeoffs needed to be made. Without consistent data, it was impossible to plan effectively, make informed staffing decisions, or advocate for the right resources.
What I Did
I partnered with the team to create a simple but powerful capacity planning tool in Microsoft Excel. Since we didn’t have funding for a dedicated system, we focused on building something practical, scalable, and easy for everyone to use.
We standardized how projects were defined and tracked across all teams, creating a consistent way to estimate effort and manage workload. The goal was to give design leaders and program managers a clear view of who was available, where bottlenecks were forming, and how to plan for future needs.
After rolling it out, we trained the team, built it into weekly planning meetings, and started collecting data that revealed resource gaps, uneven workloads, and opportunities to improve efficiency.
The Outcome
The Excel-based planning tool was quickly adopted across the organization and became a reliable way to manage workload and make informed staffing decisions.
It gave leadership a clear view of where work was piling up, where capacity was going unused, and where resources needed to shift. With that visibility, the team reduced unnecessary contractor costs and made faster, smarter decisions about how to allocate work.
Most importantly, the data revealed enough underused capacity to free up the equivalent of five full-time roles without adding headcount. Those resources were redirected to build an internal innovation team that generated roughly $1 million in design value each year.