How to Assess Organizational Capacity

Assessing organizational capacity helps news leaders answer a critical question that bridges journalistic impact, operational resilience and financial health: Can my news organization actually do what it intends to do? This training will outline how to measure organizational capacity and share frameworks for right-sizing ambitions with reality.

Defining organizational capacity and why it’s important

There are many definitions for organizational capacity, and most are industry specific. In the nonprofit sector, it often means the ability of an organization to deliver on its mission. In a governmental context, the focus tends to be on productivity and efficiency.

At LION, we define organizational capacity as a news business’s ability to meet its internal and external commitments with the resources it has. 

For the purposes of this definition, those commitments could include:

• Content commitments, like publishing a particular amount of content, on a particular cadence on a series of particular topics
• Audience commitments, like engaging with readers, viewers, followers, members or subscribers in a particular way for a particular reason
• Financial commitments, like paying expenses and meeting other financial obligations fully and in a timely manner
• Team commitments, like setting, modeling and upholding a particular team culture
• Management commitments, like supporting staff and contractors through check-ins/coordination, navigating challenges and ensuring professional development
• Organizational commitments, like setting and shepherding a strategic vision that matches your mission and builds toward sustainability
• Technology commitments, like providing the tools and tech that enable team members to do their work with as little friction as possible

And resources can include:

• Money
• Time
• People (staff and/or freelancers)
• Benefits and perks
• Structures, processes and workflows
• Training and documentation
• Individual support
• Team support
• Management support
• Opportunities for growth and development

In LION’s experience, news organizations that are overcommitted and under-resourced are those most at risk for burnout — or worse. That’s why understanding exactly what you can do with what you have is so critical. Here are some other reasons why understanding organizational capacity is important:

• It allows you to see exactly how your commitments align with your resources
• It allows you to better plan for the future by understanding where you can build — and where you might need to cut back
• It helps you better support yourself and your team
• It helps explain exactly why and where you or your team may be feeling burnt out or overcommitted so you can address problems at their source

We’ve also seen that the biggest drain on capacity for our members is editorial projects that require a lot of time and don’t always provide a lot of payoff. This is often the result of:

• Launching a news organization with a more ambitious editorial agenda than your team can realistically deliver
• Adding products, series’, features etc. over time but not eliminating any as they become less relevant or do-able
• Prioritizing projects based on relationships rather than impact
• Prioritizing splashy, high-effort projects that take more bandwidth than is available
• Not conducting audience research or measuring journalistic impact to understand what truly resonates with your audience
• Focusing on projects that don’t move the financial needle in some way
• Working with so many freelancers that managing/coordinating them takes time away from other crucial tasks

Here are some resources for addressing these issues:

• Conducting Audience Research
• Assessing Growth Opportunities
• Setting Organizational Goals

Understanding the work

The first and most important step in assessing your capacity is getting a clear, detailed understanding of where you and your team are spending your time and how long it actually takes to do the work you’re doing. This is critical because it requires that you make visible the often-invisible work that comes with running a news business. Here’s how:

Tracking projects/activities 

What are the main things your organization does? Perhaps you don’t think of them as “projects” — you might more accurately classify them as activities, processes, workflows or buckets of work. By this measure, your newsletter would count as a project, as would your ad selling workflow and, say, reader communication. And don’t forget internally facing projects! Updating your financial documents and managing your team also count as activities, because you spend time doing them. 

Write down all the tasks or activities that a specific project requires. Ask your team to participate to ensure you’re capturing everything. Here are a few tips to consider as you make this list:

• Differentiate between launching new projects and maintaining current ones, as the former takes much more time and deserves its own attention.
• Make sure you’re capturing the support work that goes into project execution, like creating and updating systems, measuring progress, setting goals etc.
• Don’t forget to include the important work of internal and external communication and coordination, like meetings, memos, emails etc.

For example, your list for selling ads might look like this:

• Research and update list of opportunities
• New client outreach
• New client meetings/phone calls
• Media kit updates
• Client cultivation and communication
• Rate card creation
• Pricing research
• Editorial calendar updates
• Team meetings
• Contract creation and negotiation
• Ad creation
• Ad placement and publication
• Troubleshooting
• Payment processing
• Tracking and reporting
• Client follow-up

We’ve created a template to assess your capacity here. 

Tracking time

How much time are you actually spending on certain tasks, and are you accounting for all the work that goes into the set-up and maintenance? For example, reeling in a major donor or landing a significant advertiser is not just a matter of taking a meeting and making a deal. It takes weeks, months and, yes, sometimes years to build that relationship and align on a plan. And that process likely entailed hours and hours of outreach to other donors or potential advertisers who may not have ended up signing on the bottom line, but required cultivation nonetheless. And what about communicating with your audience? Engaging with readers and members through your various channels requires being attentive, responsive and customer-service oriented. And that takes time you need to account for when understanding what it takes to do that work.

There are several time tracking apps that can make this easier (Clockify is another) as well as project management tools like Asana, Monday.com or Trello that can also be useful for tracking not just time, but progress. 

Tracking people

Now that you have a clear sense of what your activities are, it’s time to dig into who is doing them. Here are two useful frameworks for assessing roles and responsibilities.

• A RACI chart can be an effective tool for clarifying who is doing what. R stands for “responsible”; A stands for “accountable”; C stands for “consultant”; I stands for “informed” (we’ve found that for very small teams, everyone tends to be “informed.”) RACI charts work best when you need to articulate who is responsible for what work and can also help you gain clarity on people’s workloads to better understand where blockages or inefficiencies happen.
• A MOCHA chart allows you to dig even deeper into how the work happens. M stands for “manager,” O stands for “owner” C stands for “consulted,” H stands for “helper” and A stands for “approver.” These work best for slightly larger teams and highly collaborative teams who need to capture that teamwork on a more granular level. 

Create a RACI or a MOCHA chart for each of your projects and, once you’ve seen what each team member is responsible for, assign them a percentage for each project that captures how much of their overall time is spent on that project. It also ensures you aren’t duplicating work that others are doing, or vice versa. You’ll use this later when you’re assessing your organizational capacity.

Tracking effort and frequency

Not all activities take the same amount of effort, and it’s critical when assessing capacity to understand the mix of high, medium and low effort activities, as well as activities that are one-offs or ongoing. 

Before you start tracking effort, you’ll need to choose a period of time to track that makes sense for your organization. The most common time frames are by the week, by the month or by the quarter. Any time frame longer than that tends to be too hard to track. The shorter the time frame, the easier it is to wrap  your head around the work.

Once you’ve chosen your timeframe, revisit your list of activities and track your efforts during that timeframe by doing the following:

• Assign each activity a number between 1-3 to indicate whether it’s a 3 (high effort), 2 (medium effort) or a 1 (low effort). Then add up the numbers by project or person responsible. This will give you a big-picture sense of the labor that goes into everyone’s work, and you’ll be able to see at a glance where you and your team are spending most of your time. 
• To gain the most detailed understanding of your capacity, calculate the actual number of hours each activity takes. Group those activities by project or bucket of work and you’ll have a clear map for exactly how much effort you’re spending and on what.

Once you’ve tracked activities, people and effort, you might have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

Do the math

Here comes the fun part. You’ve got all your data and it’s time to see whether you’re at, above or below your organizational capacity by doing the following:

1. Choose a project and add up all the hours it takes to complete within your chosen time frame. This is your “project demand.”
2. Calculate the number of people involved in that project by adding up the percentages you assigned earlier for how much of each person’s time is devoted to the project. This is your “total people.”
3. Multiply your “ total people” by the number of hours your team typically works in your time frame. Be honest with yourself. If your team members typically work 50 hours a week, then that’s your number — even if you wish it was 40. If you or they are working more hours than you’d like, you can play around with the number of hours later to see whether you could meet your project demand with fewer worked hours. This is your “potential capacity.”
4. Multiply your “potential capacity” by .8 to reflect the fact that no one can work 100% of the time, and everyone spends about 20% of their work time on miscellaneous tasks like responding to Slack messages, catching up on email, eating lunch or just chatting with co-workers. This number is your “actual capacity.”
5. Subtract your “actual capacity” from  your “project demand” to arrive at your ability to meet that demand. A positive number means the project requires more work than you have capacity for. A negative number means you have more capacity than the project demands.

It could look something like this:

Here’s another example:

Project A takes 60 hours per week and there are 1.5 people working on it who work 45 hours per week. 

The actual work capacity is 1.5 x 45 x .8 = 54 hours per week

The ability to meet your project demand is 60 — 54 = 6

That means you’re over capacity to do the work required for the project and would need to divert 6 hours of someone’s else’s time to cover the work or cut back aspects of the project to align with what your team can actually do. 

If you find you’re over capacity on one or more projects, we strongly encourage you not to respond by simply working more hours. Rather, we encourage you to plug into your equation the number of hours that you and your team should be working so you have a clear sense of exactly how much you’d need to cut back to get to a more balanced place. Remember, being overcommitted and under-resourced is a recipe for burnout. 

Map your effort to impact

Knowing exactly how much effort your work takes and whether you have the capacity to do it is critical to addressing burnout and planning for the future, but only if you act on that information as you build for sustainability. That means taking the important next step of mapping your capacity onto your goals. To do that, take the following steps:

1. Revisit your mission and organizational goals to see which projects best align with the future you’ve mapped out for your business and your community. Rate each one as either high, medium or low impact to capture whether they directly serve your mission and audience and if they move the needle on your long-term sustainability. Learn how to set high-level organizational goals here and to set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals here. If you don’t already have a mission statement, here’s a resource for how to articulate one and why.  
2. Revisit your project capacity calculations and rate each project as either high, medium or low effort to capture the amount of work it takes to make them happen.
3. Create an Impact/Effort Matrix to plot out which of your projects or activities are reaping the greatest rewards and which may not be worth the effort. This will help you prioritize your work, but may also help with future management/personnel conversations to surface any mismatches (for example, you may think the effort for a particular task is low but the person you’ve hired thinks the effort is high.)

Your matrix might look something like this. Here is an editable template.  

Align your capacity with your resources

It’s decision time. If your capacity assessment has revealed a beautiful balance between your resources and your commitments, then you can go forth with the confidence that your workload is sustainable and continue to evaluate and grow accordingly. But if, in the more likely scenario, this assessment revealed some hard truths about what you can accomplish with what you’ve got, then it’s time to make some tough choices. 

The big, strategic question to ask yourself is whether you should be doing less or adding capacity. It’ll come down to budget and meeting your organizational goals. If you don’t have the budget to add capacity, then you must do less. If you have the budget to add capacity to help you meet your organizational goals, then do it! If you have the budget to do MORE than what your organizational goals are, then critically assess the organizational value of doing more.

If you need to do less:

• Eliminate or rescope high-effort, low-impact projects or activities. This may entail letting go of pet projects, things you’ve been doing for a long time or rethinking how to best meet your mission.
• Create a “Stop Doing” List to cut out work that doesn’t perform and free up your ability to focus on work that does. Here are some resources:
  • American Press Institute – How newsrooms can do less work – but have more impact
  • American Press Institute – How to stop doing work that underperforms: Advice from 4 newsrooms
  • Better News – Stop Doing list

If you need to add capacity:

• Use your capacity assessment to evaluate where to shift roles and responsibilities on your team so that you’re putting your resources toward the highest impact work.
• Create a Staffing Plan to assess exactly where a new hire would benefit your business the most. Here’s how:
  • How to Create a Staffing Plan

Assess your culture

Organizational capacity is never static. Resources, priorities and bandwidth are always changing, so it’s important to continue to keep tabs on how your news business is balancing its commitments with its ability to reasonably meet them.

A good way to stay on top of how much you and your team can handle is by measuring team health and bandwidth. There are many different frameworks you can use, or you can invent your own depending on your team culture. At LION, here are a couple ways (among others!) we aim to regularly assess our team’s wellbeing and bandwidth: 

• Each week, during an All Hands meeting, we ask each person to reflect on their week using a “Rose, Bud, Thorns” framing and to measure their emotional health through colors. “Green”: means they’re good; “yellow” means they’re struggling; “red” means they’re about to crash and burn. If anyone on the team is yellow or red, the whole team is yellow or red, and we make sure to talk about what we can do to help that person get to green. Here are some other Team Health Check ideas.
• We also created what we call a “Bandwidth-o-Meter.” Each week, team members give themselves a score that captures their reflections on their workload. Unlike the team health check-in, which is designed to measure how people are feeling, this metric measures how much work is on their plate. Here’s what the scores mean:
  • 1=I am under capacity and may be taking a breather or may be able to take on new projects or pitch in to others’ work.
  • 2=I am just under my capacity and may be taking a breather or may be able to help with others’ work as needed.
  • 3=I am right at my capacity and my workload is balanced and healthy.
  • 4=I am just over my capacity and may need to reprioritize or get others’ help.
  • 5=I am way over capacity and I have no balanced workload. Help.

If folks find themselves at a 4 for more than one week in a row, we strongly suggest they re-prioritize by either handing off some work or moving it to the back burner.

Once you get a sense for your team’s health and workload, revisit your team capacity assessment and adjust accordingly. If you find that your team is consistently yellow or red with a bandwidth of 4 or higher, then the theoretical hours they’re working per week aren’t really available or realistic  — they need time to rest or re-prioritize. Here are a few paths forward:

• Assess whether a team member is the right fit for their responsibilities. It might be that their assigned tasks and activities aren’t aligned with their skillset or experience level and they would benefit from some professional development or another role in your organization.
• Normalize asking and offering help across your team. Here are two resources that can help:
  • How to get the help you need
  • How to deal with feeling constantly overwhelmed
• Treat burnout as the industry scourge that it is and address it with intention and seriousness. Here’s a resource:
  • Addressing and avoiding burnout