When I worked for the BBC on the team creating the new Homepage, we had five product backlogs to manage, but only four agile teams, working on Search, Navigation, Content Discovery, Location Services and the core Homepage. This meant that we had to be very strict about how we prioritised our work in order to get everything done. I quickly learned that priority was directly linked to capacity management. If we didn’t take into account the capacity of the teams available to us, we risked overloading those teams, creating stress for them and falling behind on delivery.
By the time all of these products converged into a single vertical, I had already spent a couple of years coaching our teams on agile practices, refining and honing them so that they were mature and self-organising. This was a very special place to get to with this group of people, and it became clear to me that it would be antithetical to team health to try to do something like split the teams to create a fifth one. It became clear that we needed to follow the philosophy of “change the backlog, not the team”.
So I began to implement more stringent capacity management practices to help us understand how we were using our teams and their time. We looked at cycle time and lead time for our Kanban teams. We analysed in a more traditional agile way with story points for the scrum teams. By assessing the capacity of each team member and estimating the amount of work that could be completed in each sprint (or WIP limit for kanban), we were able to understand where time and effort were flowing.
Once team capacity was better understood, it was time to consider the backlogs of work sent to those teams. How were features being shaped? Was the value of each feature truly articulated and understood? How did it match up with other features on a grid of impact vs effort? I gathered all of the product managers together and we did the hard work of creating a linear prioritised backlog for all five product areas. Teams were then able to pick from this backlog knowing they were taking the next most valuable item of work.
With enough fully defined, “ready for dev” work in a meticulously prioritised backlog, the teams were able to continue to be self-organised, confident they were delivering value. This led to better productivity, improved morale and a more efficient use of people’s time and effort.
Capacity management combined with meticulous feature definition is a critical way to improve the health and wellbeing of agile teams. By improving project planning, people allocation, communication, transparency, and risk management, agile teams can deliver products more efficiently and effectively. If product and delivery managers can pair up to understand team capacity and carefully plan not to overload them, then teams can ensure that they are delivering value to their stakeholders and achieving their objectives.
So if you’re struggling to manage your workload and keep up with your product delivery, it might be time to consider implementing capacity management practices in your team.