Illustrative railway junction branching into different routes through a misty landscape.

Executive resource / Strategy & execution

Choose what your capacity can support.

Put competing initiatives, a shared constraint and the cost of delay into one discussion. Make the tradeoff explicit before committing the same people twice.

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A practical Assuras resource / No email required

The decision this supports

An agreed priority still needs available people.

Use this worksheet when several worthwhile initiatives depend on the same specialist, team or other constrained resource. Compare up to three initiatives over one period, then decide which work to start, investigate or defer.

Define one constraint.

Name the resource that limits progress: for example, an integration engineer or a process-design team. If two different resources could constrain the work, run a separate comparison for each. Their hours are not interchangeable.

Use net availability.

Agree the hours available after existing commitments, operational support, leave and any reserve. Estimate demand for the same period and resource. Involve the person who controls that allocation.

Make a leadership choice.

Capacity arithmetic exposes a constraint; it cannot decide the value of an initiative. Consider the outcome, evidence, dependencies and consequences of delay before recording the tradeoff.

Bring the executive sponsor, the resource owner and the owners of the competing initiatives. Use this as a decision record, not a substitute for a weekly schedule or a delivery estimate.

Your working comparison

One period. One shared constraint.

Start with the actual allocation available. Keep unknown values blank; the result will flag them. All hours below refer to the full comparison period, never to a week or an entire project outside that period.

Entries stay in this open page. Nothing is submitted or saved automatically. Copy or download your record before closing.

Choose Start for delivery work, Explore for a bounded investigation, or Defer for no allocation in this period. Start and Explore count toward demand. An unused initiative can remain entirely blank.

1. Set the comparison boundary
Used for context. Enter total period hours below; they are not multiplied by this number.
Hours available to these initiatives after other commitments. Enter 0 only when no hours are available.
2. Compare initiative A
For Explore, estimate only the investigation. Deferred work is excluded from the proposed total.
3. Compare initiative B
For Explore, estimate only the investigation. Deferred work is excluded from the proposed total.
4. Compare initiative C, if needed
For Explore, estimate only the investigation. Deferred work is excluded from the proposed total.

Capacity check

Make the tradeoff visible.

Available in periodNot entered
Proposed demandNot calculated
Capacity balanceNot calculated

Add the boundary and at least two initiatives to compare.

    Total hours do not show weekly peaks, sequencing, switching costs or whether the work needs the resource at the same time. Resolve those constraints with the resource owner before treating this as an agreed plan.

    5. Record the decision

    Illustrative scenario — not a client result

    Three priorities. The same integration engineer.

    A leadership team has 100 net integration-engineering hours available over four weeks. It is considering an order-routing pilot, an inventory-feed investigation and an executive reporting refresh.

    Illustrative allocation for one four-week period
    InitiativeProposed actionHours included
    Order-routing pilotStart a bounded pilot65
    Inventory-feed investigationExplore the source of exceptions25
    Reporting refreshDefer; a delivery start would require 40 hours0

    The proposal uses 90 of the 100 available hours, leaving 10 unallocated. Starting the reporting work as well would require 130 hours and exceed the available allocation by 30. That arithmetic surfaces a choice; it does not prove the pilot is the right choice.

    The team must still confirm the engineer’s weekly availability, the evidence behind the 65-hour estimate and who accepts another period of manual reporting. It records those conditions and names the sponsor who can revisit the allocation.

    Turn the comparison into a commitment

    Protect the work you choose to start.

    Confirm the allocation with the resource owner. Tell the owners of deferred initiatives what the decision means and when it will be reviewed. Avoid leaving every initiative nominally active while the same people absorb the conflict.

    If the constraint is unclear, use the workflow baseline worksheet to distinguish active work, waiting and rework. If a technology purchase is part of the decision, test the work it must support with the software evaluation worksheet.

    For a broader commitment, use Assuras’ executive decision record and execution-readiness assessment.

    Keep the working record

    Take it into the conversation.

    Your branded PDF includes the entries, working assumptions and current result, ready to share or print. Use it to agree an owner and the evidence needed for the next decision.

    From the worksheet to the work

    Resolve the decision behind the resource conflict.

    If competing priorities keep drawing on the same people, bring the outcomes, constraints and unresolved choices into one focused discussion with Assuras.

    Explore management consulting

    Discuss a prioritization decision

    ASSURAS / EXECUTIVE RESOURCES

    Initiative-capacity comparison

    A discussion aid based on the entries supplied. Illustrative examples are not client results.