Capacity planning
Stop making assumptions about your bandwidth and start planning your capacity, as a team.
USE THIS PLAY TO...
Understand your team's true capacity
Take the guess-work out of estimation and prioritization exercises
If you're struggling with , or on your Health Monitor, running this play might help.
People
3 - 8
Time
30 min
Difficulty
Easy
Running the play
Prior to the session, ask everyone to observe and consider writing down what activities, formal and informal, make up their weeks. This will help with accuracy and expedite the first part of the activity.
Materials
Whiteboard or butcher's paper
Markers
Pens
Notepads
Timer
Step 1
Set the stage (5 min)
Introduce this exercise as a way to improve overall team health so the team feels comfortable honestly reporting their weekly hours and availability. Share how the output of this exercise will be used – for example, many teams at Atlassian review and update their individual capacities in their bi-weekly sprint planning. Poll the room (if you're doing this with your team) and ask them what problem you're here to analyse. Write all responses down on a whiteboard.
Be ready for intentional and unintentional bias in the answers you discuss here. Make sure the room doesn't try to steer away from an uncomfortable truth, or try to reach an easy consensus.
If there isn't one clear problem, you'll need to agree on which problem to work on – which on it's own should be pretty revealing! Once you're agreed, write the succinct problem statement on the board.
Step 2
Build out a typical week's work for each individual (5 min)
Ask everyone to independently write down all the things they do in a typical week, along with an estimate of how much time you spend on it, expressed as hours per week. Look at your calendar, email inbox, Jira tickets, and chat channels to ensure you're painting the full picture.
Then, calculate the percentage of time they are spending on this project by dividing the weekly on hours spent on this project by the total weekly hours.
Pro Tip
Make sure to include time spent on bug fixing, incident response, administrative tasks, recurring meetings, coffee runs, unplanned hallway chats, 1:1s, etc. and make sure to separate out the hours you spend on different projects.
Step 3
Summarize how much time is being spent on this project (15 min)
Summarize the team's capacity in a table. First group all people in the same role. For each role, record each individual in a row and include their total weekly hours spent on this project. After you've recorded every individual in the same role, add up the total hours available for that role.
Repeat until you've recorded all roles and team members in your table.
For example...
Your capacity plan table should look something like this. (But if it doesn't, y'know... we won't judge.)
Step 4
Agree on next steps (5 min)
Now that you have a capacity baseline, how often will you review your team allocation? Are there responsibilities with no owners? We'd recommend using the output of this session to guide your estimation and prioritization exercises for your team's upcoming projects.
Nailed it?
Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.
Variations
An express 10-minute version of this exercise can be done as part of a IT Project Kick-Off. For the express version, ask team members to come prepped with a list of activities and give five minutes for individual calculation and five minutes to summarize the team's capacity.
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