Workload truth

Monday's native Workload widget gets four things wrong, all silently. Subitem assignments are invisible to it. Items in Done-equivalent status groups still count toward the capacity bar. Team-column assignments register against a single 40hr bucket instead of N members × daily hours. And the widget's working-day math ignores holidays in a person's schedule, so a holiday week reads as artificial over-utilization. This tool recomputes utilization with all four corrections and shows the "widget says X / reality is Y" delta per person and per team.

Where this came from

The widget says on-track. The person is drowning.

Two threads on community.monday.com surface the failure mode in the customers' own words. The first — "Workload wrong — team capacity and status completed not considered" — documents two of the four flaws on a single board: Done items keep contributing to the capacity bar even after they're closed out, and items assigned to a Team column register against a single 40hr bucket instead of being divided across the team's active members. The second — "Workload widget with schedules does not calculate utilisation correctly" — documents the holiday-math artifact: a person whose work schedule excludes a public holiday in the window gets normalized against the un-adjusted calendar and the widget shows 125% utilization when the underlying hours are actually fine. The subitem blindness is documented in multiple support discussions in the same forum — subitems are architecturally separate from parent items in the Workload widget's data model, and there is no toggle to include them.

The shape of the pain is the same across all four. A team lead opens the Workload widget to decide who's underwater and who has bandwidth. The widget says everyone's on track. A week later somebody quits or misses a deadline, and the post-mortem turns up the same conversation: they were at 128% the whole time, but the widget only saw 50% because half their effort lived in subitems. Or: the widget said the team was 400% over because every team-column item dumped into a 40hr bucket, and the lead spent a quiet morning trying to figure out which assignments to undo before realizing the math was wrong. The widget's blind spots aren't configurable away — subitems are architecturally separate from parents in the widget's data model, and the team-capacity-as-40hr behavior is documented as "by design" in multiple support threads. Re-doing the math outside Monday is the only way to see the corrected number.

The widget exists to answer one question: who has capacity and who doesn't. Four of the inputs to that question are wrong by default. The toggle says everyone's fine. The person on the receiving end of the over-assignment is the one who finds out the toggle was lying.Why this matters past convenience

What it does

Four corrections, a verdict roll-up, one page.

Generated Workload Truth Report showing Apex Defense workspace header, summary row with 8 people and 2 teams and 1 overloaded and several widget blind-spots and 2 holiday-adjusted, RED verdict block naming Alex Park at 128 percent, Where the widget lies callout with top deltas, per-person utilization table sorted by reality percent descending with Alex Park at 128 vs widget 50 marked OVERLOADED, and per-team utilization table with Defense PMO at reality 51 percent vs widget 400 percent. — Generated report — Apex Defense demo, 8 people / 2 teams across 4 boards, verdict RED (one person over 100% reality)

The four widget corrections

Correction 1 — Subitems counted Subitem hours are added to the assignee's reality total. The widget only reads the parent item's people column. A person assigned to six subitems totaling 30hr shows 0hr in the widget; this tool sums the subitem hours into the same person's reality column. In the fixture, this is what drives Alex Park from a widget-visible 50% to a corrected 128%.

Correction 2 — Done items excluded Items in a Done-equivalent status group don't contribute to reality hours. The Done test is a case-insensitive regex (Done|Complete|Closed|Archived by default, configurable per fixture). The widget keeps Done items in the bar, which is what inflates Bianca Reyes to widget 95% when her reality is 60%.

Correction 3 — Team capacity = N × daily A team's reality capacity is the sum of each active member's individual capacity. The widget treats every team as a single 40hr bucket; this tool sums each member's daily hours times their working days. In the fixture, Defense PMO has 4 active members whose individual capacities sum to 312hr (one of them observes the holiday). 160hr of assigned work against 312hr reality cap = 51%; against the widget's 40hr bucket the same 160hr reads as 400%.

Correction 4 — Holidays subtracted A person's reality capacity is daily hours times working days minus holidays in their work schedule. The widget normalizes against the un-adjusted calendar regardless of whether the person observes the holiday in the window. Diana Ortiz observes the holiday, so her reality cap drops from 80hr to 72hr; her 72hr of assigned work then reads as 100% reality vs 90% widget.

Verdict roll-up

One workspace-level verdict, set by the worst-fired threshold:

REDAny person's reality utilization > 100% OR any team's reality utilization > 100%.
AMBERWidget understates any person's utilization by > 25 percentage points OR any person's subitem hours are ≥ 50% above parent hours.
GREENNo reality overloads, widget and reality agree within 25 percentage points across all people.

The bundled fixture lands on RED via Alex Park (128% reality), with an AMBER widget-understates trigger appended to the reason list so the reader knows both failure modes were observed in the same workspace.

What ends up on the page

Summary header (people, teams, overloaded count, widget-blindspot count, holiday-adjusted count). Workload-health verdict (RED/AMBER/GREEN) with named reasons. "Where the widget lies" callout naming the top three absolute widget-vs-reality deltas. Per-person utilization table sorted by reality % descending — columns for reality hours, reality cap, reality %, widget %, delta, and per-row notes (OVERLOADED, widget-understates >25pp, done-inflated, subitem-heavy, holiday-adjusted). Per-team utilization table — columns for member count, team hours, reality cap, reality %, widget cap, widget %, delta.

Monday Workload Truth local UI showing health dot, discovery bar with 4 boards and 35 items and 28 subitems and 8 people and 2 teams, and Discover plus Generate report buttons. — The local UI — click Discover, then Generate report

What it's not

The honest scope of v1.

v1 is demo mode only. The discover script reads the bundled sample-data/workload.json fixture — an Apex Defense workspace with 4 boards, 35 parent items, 28 subitems, 8 active people, 2 teams (Defense PMO with 4 members, Compliance with 3), and one workspace holiday inside the 14-day window. You can evaluate the report shape, the four corrections, the verdict logic, and the per-row notes end-to-end with no Monday credentials. Live mode (Monday GraphQL walk of items + subitems + people-column resolution + team capacity reconciliation) is deferred to v2 once usage validates the demand.

Read-only audit. The tool tells you which utilization numbers are wrong and by how much; it does not write back to Monday, doesn't fix assignments, doesn't suggest who to move work to. The output is a single self-contained HTML file. v1 is read-only by design.

Not a replacement for the widget — it's an audit of the widget. The Workload widget still has a place in day-to-day flow; this tool runs alongside it, on a cadence (weekly, before sprint planning, before staffing decisions), to show where the widget number is misleading. The report shows the widget % and the reality % side-by-side so the reader can see how far off the in-product number is on every row.

No alternative-assignment simulation. v1 reports the corrected numbers; it does not propose what to reassign or to whom. The reader looks at the rows where reality % is over 100, decides what to move, and makes the move in Monday by hand. Bulk-fix or "what-if" simulation is out of scope for v1.

Why not just use Monday's native workload widget

Native shows the wrong number. The audit shows it next to the right one.

Monday's Workload widget reports a utilization figure derived from four inputs that are wrong by default — subitems missing, Done items still counted, team capacity treated as a single 40hr bucket, holidays ignored. The widget number is what the team lead sees; the corrected number is the one the staffing decision should be based on. The audit shows both, on the same row, with the delta in between, so the reader can see exactly which people the widget is lying about and by how much.

What you need

Requirements

OSWindows, macOS, or Linux
RuntimePowerShell 7+ (pwsh). 5.1 is not supported.
BrowserAnything modern. UI on localhost:8790.
MondayLive mode deferred to v2 — will use Monday GraphQL (api.monday.com/v2) walking items + subitems + people column + team column. v1 demonstrates the report shape on a bundled fixture.
Demo modeBundled 8-person / 2-team / 4-board / 35-parent-item / 28-subitem Apex Defense fixture — 14-day window, 10 working days, 1 holiday — runs end-to-end with no creds.

Get the tool

Three files. Free.

The tool, a user guide, and a prompt guide showing the spec, the four-correction math, the fixture engineering that pins the per-person and per-team numbers, the Pester contract, and the HTML rendering.

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