A tangent from my usual posts, but the principle mapped over cleanly.
I've been helping a small family food business figure out their catering ops, and the single biggest predictor of whether an order goes smoothly isn't the food or the price. It's lead time. The customers who book two weeks out get exactly what they want. The ones who call the day before get whatever's possible, at a premium, with the stress baked in.
That's the same lesson as capacity planning. Slack in the schedule isn't waste; it's the buffer that absorbs the things you didn't foresee. A kitchen booked to 100% today has zero room for the surprise 80-person order tomorrow, exactly like a service running at redline has no headroom for a traffic spike.
The practical version they wrote up: how far in advance to book halal catering in Toronto. Short answer: the good vendors and the good dates go early, and "we'll figure it out later" is how you end up paying rush pricing for a worse result.
Applies to deploys, launches, and dinner for 80. Give the system time and it gives you options. Compress the timeline and every problem gets more expensive.
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