Week 51 of the year 2024

- 2 minutes read - 280 words

This Week’s Challenges:

Navigating Team Capacity Planning

This week was pretty low, but still presented an interesting managerial challenge: the quarterly team capacity estimation meeting. Together with Technical Project Managers (TPMs) and engineering leadership, we meticulously planned for the upcoming quarter’s workload.

The core of our planning process involved a relatively straightforward calculation. Given a three-month quarter, we factored in six sprints per engineer, accounting for planned vacations. From this total, we allocated time for essential activities:

  • Operational On-Call Duties: 10% of team time, based on historical data.
  • “Run the Business” Activities: 10% of team time, also based on past trends.
  • Technical Debt Remediation: 20% of team time, a percentage determined by the current depth of our technical debt backlog.

With these allocations in place, the remaining 60% of team time was dedicated to achieving our Product OKRs.

This exercise underscored the importance of data-driven decision-making in capacity planning. By analyzing historical data and considering the current state of our technical debt, we were able to allocate resources effectively and ensure a balanced workload for our team.

Key Takeaways:

  • Accurate capacity planning is crucial for successful project execution. Generally speaking, the planning is a bit underrated in the Agile world, which makes it difficult to join development everyday Scrum process with mid-term predictable deliverables.
  • Data-driven decision-making is essential for informed resource allocation. And this is where all those formal processes (like opening bugs and incidents) start to make sense, since now we can use JIRA to actually distinguish how much time the team spent in each bucket.
  • Balancing operational responsibilities, technical debt, and product delivery is key to long-term team success.

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