🏖️ Vacation season is approaching. And with it comes a familiar pattern in many Scrum teams:
A sprint is planned carefully. Commitments seem realistic. Yet only a few days later, execution starts to fall apart:
❌ Critical skills are unavailable at the same time
❌ Work piles up in specific disciplines
❌ Dependencies suddenly become visible
❌ Stories remain blocked
The problem is rarely poor planning.
The real issue is a lack of transparency into actual team availability.
We often plan as if teams were fully available and stable — even though we know that's rarely the case, especially during holiday periods.
The real question is not:
“Did we plan well enough?”
But rather:
“On what data did we base our planning?”
Only when absences, skill distributions, and dependencies become systematically visible can teams create realistic sprints instead of relying on well-intentioned assumptions.
Sprintometer integrates directly with Outlook. Team absences are automatically reflected in the dashboard, and potential capacity risks are highlighted early.
Before the sprint starts.
Before dependencies emerge.
And most importantly: before bottlenecks form.
How do you keep track of team capacity during vacation season?
