Count whole items per reviewer
The planner treats each item as work completed by one reviewer. It first divides each reviewer’s available minutes by the minutes per item and rounds down, then multiplies by the number of reviewers. Unused fragments of different people’s time are not pooled into another completed item. Minutes accept tenths; staffing and work counts are whole numbers.
| Input or result | Value |
|---|---|
| Reviewers | 2 |
| Minutes per reviewer per day | 180 |
| Minutes per whole item | 10 |
| Whole items per reviewer | 18 |
| Daily team capacity | 36 items |
Two reviewers each have seven minutes; one item takes twelve minutes and cannot be split. Is capacity one item?
Show the worked answer
No. Each reviewer has capacity floor(7 ÷ 12)=0, so the team completes zero whole items. Aggregating fourteen minutes would violate this model’s one-reviewer-per-item rule.
Add arrivals before the day’s work
New items arrive before processing on each modelled working day. Available work is opening backlog plus arrivals; processed work is the lesser of available work and daily capacity. The remainder carries to the next day. The graph includes the initial backlog at day zero and the end-of-day balances.
| Day | Opening | Arrivals | Processed | End |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 100 | 20 | 36 | 84 |
| 6 | 20 | 20 | 36 | 4 |
| 7 | 4 | 20 | 24 | 0 |
Under the example, is the queue empty at the end of day six?
Show the worked answer
No. Four items remain at day six. Day seven begins with four, receives twenty and processes twenty-four; it is the first empty end-of-day queue.
These are constant planning assumptions, not a prediction of real attendance or completion speed. Days are working days you define; holidays, absence, priority changes and varying task duration are outside this model. Recheck the inputs against measured operations before scheduling staff. If daily arrivals exceed capacity, the backlog grows even with a low initial balance.