Resource Allocation Software
Allocation is the question you ask mid-sprint, not before it starts: who's actually carrying too much right now, and where does the next thing go instead.
Allocation is what happens after the plan meets reality
Planning and allocation get used interchangeably, but they're different moments. Planning is the bet you make before work starts, who's likely free next sprint. Allocation is the correction you make once it's running and the bet turns out half wrong: two people are drowning, one is coasting, and a new request just showed up with nowhere obvious to go.
Some tools answer this with a resource-leveling engine: drag a bar, type a percentage, watch a chart rebalance. ShipSprint doesn't have that screen, and it's worth saying plainly rather than letting a trial reveal it. What it has is a live view of who's over their limit right now, built from the board rather than from a percentage someone entered and forgot to update.
That's a narrower claim than "resource allocation software" usually implies. It's also one that stays true a month after setup, which the percentage chart rarely does.
How load gets seen and moved
Nothing here rebalances itself, it surfaces the pressure so a person can.
Every column can carry a cap. When someone's column is full, the next card can't land quietly on top, it waits, visibly, until something moves or the limit is deliberately raised.
Requests arrive in a shared inbox rather than straight onto a task list, so whoever's allocating has a moment to look at current load before anything becomes a commitment.
Availability accounts for approved leave and out-of-office time automatically, so "who's free to take this" isn't answered by someone's memory of who mentioned a holiday in standup.
One tap says "I'm blocked" and pulls in the right person with the task's context already attached. The fastest form of reallocation is often just unsticking the thing that's stuck, not necessarily moving it to someone else.
On Team plan and above, GitHub branches move cards automatically and merged pull requests close them, so allocation reflects what engineers are actually doing rather than what they said they'd do in planning.
The owner command center shows load across every department at once, so a person flagged as over capacity in engineering isn't invisible to whoever's about to hand marketing a new deadline.
A Tuesday this is built for
A support escalation lands mid-sprint. The obvious person to fix it already has a full column, the WIP limit says so before anyone has to ask them how they're doing. The lead looks at who else is under their cap this week, factoring in the two days of leave one candidate has coming up, and reassigns it to someone with visible room rather than the person who happens to answer messages fastest.
Later that day, an engineer taps "I'm blocked" on a card waiting for a design review. The designer gets pulled in with the card's context already attached, no re-explaining the ask in a new message. The block clears in twenty minutes instead of sitting until someone happens to notice.
By Friday, the owner command center shows two people over capacity for the week. That's not a surprise announced in a retro; it was visible the moment it happened, to the manager who could actually do something about it. This is the kind of thing teams on ShipSprint usually mean when they say load stopped being a surprise: the number was already sitting on a screen someone was already looking at.
None of this is engineering-specific. An operations manager runs the same triage inbox for vendor escalations, on an ops board with ops terminology, and hits the same WIP limit warning when the on-call rotation is already stretched. The mechanism doesn't care which department is holding the load.
Reallocation, without it reading as a demotion
Moving work off someone is a small, awkward act of management, and the awkwardness usually comes from opacity, the person finds out their load changed without knowing why, or worse, hears about it secondhand. ShipSprint doesn't fix the awkwardness, but it removes the ambiguity: the WIP limit that triggered the move is visible on the board, not a private judgment call nobody can see the reasoning behind.
The same applies to the numbers behind the decision. Scorecards are leave-adjusted and visible to the person they describe, not just to whoever's reallocating, so if someone's load is being redistributed because their capacity looks tight this week, they're looking at the same leave-adjusted number the manager is, not hearing about it as a surprise.
None of this comes from activity tracking. There's no screenshot, no keystroke log, no idle timer feeding the allocation decision, only board position, logged hours and approved leave, which are the same three things a manager would ask about in a one-on-one anyway.
What this doesn't do
It won't auto-rebalance a team the way a resource-leveling algorithm claims to. Nobody gets silently reassigned by the system; a WIP limit blocks a new card from landing, but a person decides where it goes instead. That's a deliberate choice, automatic reallocation tends to optimise for a spreadsheet looking tidy, not for the actual judgment calls a lead makes about who can absorb what.
It also won't produce a formal percentage-of-time allocation report, "this person spent 34% of Q2 on Client A," for billing or utilization purposes. If that's the report you need, ask before buying rather than assuming it. What you get instead is a live, honest picture of who's over their limit today, which solves a more common problem: work quietly piling up on the person who never says no.
What it costs
- Free covers up to 5 users and 2 projects, permanently, enough to see WIP limits and the triage inbox in action. Team is ₹299 per user monthly or ₹2,899 yearly, up to 40 users.
- Business, at ₹599 per user monthly or ₹6,499 yearly, adds the owner command center and velocity-based forecasts, plus unlimited projects and SSO.
- Every paid plan starts with a 14-day trial on full Business access, a sample project preloaded, no card required. Full breakdown at pricing.
Common questions
No, there's no percentage-of-time field. Load is shown as WIP limits and current capacity, adjusted for leave, rather than a split typed in and left to age. If a formal utilization percentage is what you need for billing, this isn't built for that; ask before you buy.
Planning is the question asked before a sprint starts, who's likely free. Allocation is the correction made once work is already running and the plan turns out to need adjusting, who's over their limit right now, and where the next thing should go instead.
No. WIP limits stop a card from landing quietly on someone already full, and the blocked flow pulls in the right person fast, but a human still decides who picks up what. Nothing gets silently reassigned.
On Team plan and above, yes. Branches move cards and merged pull requests close them, so the board, and the load it shows, reflects what's actually shipped rather than what was estimated at planning time.
WIP limits, the triage inbox and the blocked flow are on every paid plan from Team upward. The owner command center and cross-team capacity view are on Business, which the free trial runs on by default, see pricing.
Related pages
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