I speak with many Software Development Leaders periodically and I find that many of them don’t have a model for managing the capacity of their team. While this is super critical for platform teams that have a wide set of stakeholders, I believe it is important for any large teams (25+) that have a combination of internal and shared goals with their stakeholders. Without a capacity management model, it is harder to prioritize among competing initiatives. In addition, it makes it hard for engineers to spend time on operational excellence, tech debt reduction and conceive and deliver capabilities proactively before the business stakeholders want them.
I like to use the 30/30/30 capacity model (credit to one of my previous managers) split
- Operational Excellence: Keeping the lights on work, on-call and smaller operational improvements work fit into this bucket
- Tactical Features: Features / Capabilities that will deliver business benefits in the short term (i.e make an impact on the year’s OKR’s)
- Strategic Focus: Features/Capabilities that take longer to build and will drive outcomes in the longer term. This might also include larger Architectural work that might not fit into the Operational Excellence category
Having a model and creating transparency allows the development team to have a healthy debate on priorities both within the team and outside. It also forces the discussion on milestones and output metrics that drive the prioritization. Quite a few people have asked me what happens with the remaining 10%– to them, I would like to say ‘you have no idea what you are talking about’, but I usually hold back my obnoxiousness.