How do you plan resources and capacity?

[Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION AG_]

One of the most important tasks for a company is resource and capacity planning in order to avoid both overload and idle time for employees and to plan projects properly “in scope, time, and budget.”

In doing so, it is very important to look at both individual projects and the company as a whole.

An agile approach is certainly very valuable here, in which team members work through backlogs independently and with focus, pulling their tasks from the backlog themselves, but this does not always work. For example, orders do not always arrive in the right order or with the right scope, so team members have to help other teams. Or backlogs are not realistic in size, so tasks are reassigned by supervisors, for example.

How do you keep your backlogs at a realistic size? How do you plan your capacities over projects?