A strategic plan that lists three priorities and assigns money to each is half a plan. The missing half is the answer to a much harder question: whose week is this, and for how much of it?
That's a bandwidth budget. Almost no organization writes one. Every organization needs one.
Why money budgets aren't enough
Money is fungible and slow. Attention is finite and weekly. A €500K initiative can be approved on Monday and quietly stall by Friday because the two senior engineers it depends on are still on last quarter's fire. The money was never the constraint. The week was.
Capacity is rarely the constraint. Focus is. Walk into any management room. Count the initiatives. If it's over seven, you don't have a strategy. You have a wish list.
What a bandwidth budget looks like
For each strategic priority, write three numbers:
- The named people. Not "engineering." Three names. If you can't name them, the priority is not staffed; it's hoped.
- The percentage of their week. 60% for the lead, 30% for the supporting engineer, 20% for the PM. If the percentages of an individual across all priorities add up to more than 100%, the strategy is overbooked and one priority is fiction.
- The duration in weeks. Strategic work without an end date is a haunting, not an initiative.
Now stack those allocations across your top three to five bets. The first thing you'll discover is that your CTO is allocated at 240%. The second thing you'll discover is which "priority" your organization is actually choosing — by giving it the people.
What changes once you write it down
Three things, immediately:
- Adding a new initiative becomes a visible tradeoff. You can't add a fourth bet without naming whose week comes off bet one, two, or three.
- The Do-Not list writes itself. Anything that wants the same people as a current priority either replaces it or waits.
- The weekly cadence stops being a status meeting and starts being a re-allocation meeting. The question isn't "how are we doing?" It's "is this still where the bandwidth should be?"
The Vindaris view
Strategy without an honest accounting of capacity is fiction. The system should make it impossible to add a new initiative without showing what gets removed, what bandwidth it consumes, and what budget it spends.
A money budget tells you what you can afford to start. A bandwidth budget tells you what you can afford to finish.