Capacity Truth Lag

Capacity Truth Lag is the gap between when a resource plan is set and when it reflects what is actually happening on client work. Agencies that schedule from stale data overbook senior specialists and underbook juniors, then discover the mismatch only when a retainer deliverable slips. The lag compounds: a two-week-old heatmap in Float or Resource Guru hides the fact that a designer has already been pulled onto an unplanned client request. Closing the lag means treating timesheet and booking data as a live input, not a monthly report. Toggl and Everhour feed actual hours back into the plan, while Runn and Tempo surface forecast-versus-actual variance before it becomes a margin problem. The framework matters because a plan that is 80% accurate today beats a perfect plan that is three weeks old.