sm-capacity-planning

Sprint Capacity Planning

Purpose

Committing more than the team can actually deliver erodes trust, demoralises Developers, and makes velocity data meaningless. Committing too little wastes Sprint potential and frustrates the Product Owner. This skill does the arithmetic so the team can make an honest commitment.

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Tool detection

1. Check for active mcp__azure-devops__* tools → $PM_TOOL = ado
2. Check for active mcp__jira__* tools → $PM_TOOL = jira
3. If neither → $PM_TOOL = manual

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Step 1 — Get Sprint parameters

Collect or detect the following:

Sprint dates

• ADO: use work_list_team_iterations or work_list_iterations to find the next iteration and its start/end dates
• Jira: use the sprint listing tool to find the upcoming sprint
• Manual: ask "What are the start and end dates for the next Sprint?"

Calculate $WORKING_DAYS — the number of working days between start and end (exclude weekends by default; ask about public holidays in the team's locale).

Focus factor The percentage of working time a developer realistically spends on sprint work (excluding email, meetings outside Scrum, interruptions). Default: 70%. Ask if the team has a known different value.

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Step 2 — Get team members

• ADO: use work_get_team_capacity or work_get_iteration_capacities for the upcoming iteration; read each team member and their planned days off
• Jira: use the team/member listing tool or ask manually
• Manual: ask "Who is on the team this Sprint? List each person."

For each team member, ask (or read from the tool):

• Days off during the Sprint (vacation, sick, training, public holidays)
• Reduced availability (part-time, shared with another team, on-call rotation)

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Step 3 — Calculate capacity

For each team member:

Available days = $WORKING_DAYS − days_off − reduced_availability_days
Focus hours = available_days × hours_per_day × focus_factor

Default: hours_per_day = 8, focus_factor = 0.70