D · Delivery and ongoing operations

Capacity and dependencies

Capacity, dependencies, commitments, and resource conflicts.

Classification boundary

Include: Include matching staffing, budget, dependencies, and interrupt load to delivery commitments.

Choose a neighboring leaf when: Use C for which work is more valuable and F team design for long-term structure and responsibilities.

This capability may appear in standards across different stages. Explore stage expectations

34 questions

Choose a group based on the evidence you need. Groups follow existing question formats, not difficulty or mandatory prerequisites. Each batch has up to eight questions.

Judgment and options34

Compare goals, constraints, options, and trade-offs.

Questions 1–8

A serious production incident pulls two specialists from a project team for a full week, putting a milestone at risk. How would you update the forecast, separate incident and project responsibilities, and help stakeholders make trade-offs?
A project depends on another team for an interface or data contract, but there is no clear delivery owner, plans keep changing, and the work may not fit next quarter’s schedule. How would you establish a commitment, prepare alternatives, manage critical-path risk, and decide when to escalate or change scope?
Faced with a large problem that is still unclear, how do you plan how many people and resources are needed? How do you estimate under uncertainty, invest in stages, and ask upward for resources?
A team has held delivery for months only by working overtime. How do you tell whether it is a people problem or a capacity gap, and what do you do?
Incidents and recovery work interrupt every iteration, and roadmap commitments keep slipping. Leadership wants the dates preserved without adding staff. How would you propose capacity and goal changes?
For several quarters, production support, customer escalations, and cross-team requests have displaced roadmap work. Someone proposes a universal 20% reserve, though interruption rates vary. How would you set the reserve?
How do you work out what your team can really commit to next cycle, rather than headcount times working days?
When you made this decision, what resources did you have and how wide was your scope of collaboration? How did those limits shape your choices?

Questions 9–16

Three projects list the same platform team as a critical dependency, and all buffer time is allocated. A new regulatory requirement must ship before quarter-end. How would you reallocate capacity and commitments?
One owner is responsible for four high-priority projects. Status reports look normal, but risk handling, cross-team decisions, and retrospectives are all delayed. How would you decide whether to add support, reassign ownership, or reduce the portfolio?
Several teams list the same domain expert as a critical-path resource and each plan assumes full-time support. How would you establish capacity facts, compare dependency risk, and negotiate a deliverable arrangement?
Every initiative in the quarterly portfolio is labeled top priority, but Product, Data, and Security lack capacity to support them all. How would you standardize priority definitions, expose dependencies, and make resource trade-offs?
The plan allocates one week for design before development, but the work includes user research, accessibility review, and interaction validation; designers also support several products. How would you re-estimate design capacity and dependency order?
A team owns product changes and customer-support rotations; support demand rises in peak seasons, while plans still reserve a fixed percentage. How would you use workload evidence to create flexible capacity and service priorities?
A mobile release depends on app-store review with variable duration; backend and web can launch earlier, but a marketing campaign has a fixed date. How would you plan release windows, feature flags, and cross-platform degradation?
Several teams use one deployment pipeline and fixed maintenance windows, but their changes differ in size and rollback readiness; one team's delay steals validation time from others. How would you plan release capacity and resolve conflicts?

Questions 17–24

Several teams rotate on-call for core services, but plans count only project hours; incident investigation and drills displace planned work, and service loads vary widely. How would you forecast capacity and create a fair cross-team model?
A project estimates only two weeks of implementation but often takes two months because design review, legal approval, and data access queues. How would you separate work time from wait time and negotiate capacity changes to reduce queues?
Only one senior engineer understands a core module. The team wants that person to deliver roadmap work and onboard two successors, while the business worries about short-term output. How would you estimate capacity for knowledge transfer and its long-term risk and value?
Annual project funding is approved, but critical roles remain unfilled and outsourcing is limited by security requirements; another team has available people but needs role changes. How would you compare delay, scope reduction, internal transfer, and budget reallocation?
After a project starts, a key domain expert leaves and no replacement is ready. The team can wait, change sequencing, or narrow the first release. How would you assess capacity and dependencies and update commitments?
The team has been interrupted by unplanned support work for three quarters and commitment completion has fallen. Leadership wants everyone fully booked to raise utilization. How would you propose a more reliable plan?
A vendor’s committed throughput is below peak-season forecast, and migration to an alternative takes two months. How would you plan capacity and business constraints?
A shared platform team is preempted weekly by new business requests, delaying reliability and migration commitments. How would you design intake, capacity, and prioritization?

Questions 25–32

After a hiring freeze, the team has 30 percent fewer hours next quarter, but the business goal and date remain unchanged. How would you offer credible commitments without defaulting to overtime?
The team plans all capacity for new features, while incidents and customer escalations interrupt delivery. How would you use historical data to set and review a support reserve?
A migration needs two weeks of platform support, but that team can offer only half a day each week. How would you compare waiting, parallel work, interface freezes, and scope reduction?
After hiring, throughput remains flat while review queues and coordination time rise. How would you separate onboarding cost, work allocation, and system bottlenecks?
A strategic project has consumed senior engineers for two quarters, delaying maintenance and security work. How would you show opportunity cost and present capacity options?
The plan assumes three shared workdays each week, but local holidays and support rotations reduce overlap. How would you build a realistic calendar and response agreement?
After a key operations lead leaves, the team wants to spread the work evenly. Some tasks require specific access and experience. How would you route, pause, and escalate the work?
Four plans underestimated review and rework time. Leaders demand more accurate estimates. How would you improve the process, record uncertainty, and avoid turning estimates into a blame metric?

Questions 33–34

Two business units promised customers the same delivery window, but shared capacity can support only one. How would you present scope, timing, quality, and customer-risk choices?
Five channels have different levels of maturity, so their short-term returns are not directly comparable. How would you allocate baseline funding, exploration budget, and review dates?

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