Don't feed the beast
It can be easy to worry about having enough work for your team and fall into the trap of trying to keep your team busy. This will likely reduce your impact.
It can be easy to worry about having enough work for your team. It can be easy to fall into the trap of trying to keep your team busy. But this can be the wrong order of events.
The flow of value is more important than utilisation.
A traditional measurement that was used extensively in previous decades and which you occasionally still come across is ‘Utilisation’. This measures the ratio of time across all development staff allocated to project work versus their collective slack time i.e., unallocated time.
It seems like a sensible measure on face value - to focus on making sure there’s less unallocated time so that you are getting the most out of your team. It does not stand up to scrutiny unfortunately.
Having members of the team fully utilised does not leave any slack in the system should something change. Every unexpected extra commitment has a flow on impact that adds delays across the board.
The effect of this can be especially bad where team members are allocated to multiple priorities concurrently - a characteristic of some project management approaches. If the nature of work is in anyway way complicated, for instance if its unpredictable and not deterministic the chance of unexpected changes is high and all projects the fully allocated individuals are participating on are likely to slip and take longer.
By ‘not deterministic’ I mean that the result of work conducted is not knowable - a good example of this is product work where at best you can have a hypothesis on what will meet a user’s need but won’t know until they are using it and validate what you’ve provided meets their needs.
What’s more important is that you are spending as much time making progress on the most valuable priorities for your organisation. Counter-intuitively this means that maintaining slack to account for the unexpected, ensuring people have one focus and spending more time on understanding what is important for your organisation and the beneficiaries of the value it provides are more important for maximising impact than ensuring everyone is busy.
Don’t commit to lower value work for the sake of being busy.
Successful organisations have a strong understanding of what is important and what they urgently need to solve to be most competitive or most likely to fulfil their purpose or execute their chosen strategy.
In organisation’s where being busy has become the normal mode of operations it’s not uncommon to be in the situation of a project being put on hold or delayed and to find there’s the potential for a lot of people to be facing idle time. The mission then seems simple - “what are we going to find to keep these people busy?”.
The problem with this approach is that the standard for satisfying this question is simply work that will occupy them. The likelihood is high that the work is the most easy to discover and thus a high chance of being low value. If you are missing a model of understanding what would be truly the most valuable contribution to your organisation it is likely more impactful to invest the necessary time to address this.
This may mean a longer period with more of the team not committed to a priority. Maybe some might refocus to support you on doing the discovery required to properly identify the most valuable opportunities. For the remainder its better to focus on low commitment work such as addressing technical debt or making small improvements that can be paused when there’s a clearer view on what’s valuable.
The ‘don’t feed the beast’ idiom can be described as:
To devote or contribute an undue amount of resources, time, or energy to a self-perpetuating pursuit, situation, behaviour, or desire.
In this case the pursuit is to keep your team busy. Your team doesn’t exist to be busy. It exists to fulfil its purpose, to be valuable and to be impactful. When you are clear on how they do that there won’t be the hunt to keep them busy. Your focus will be to have the impact you are striving for and then to move to the next best opportunity to provide value to the organisation.
Have you ever felt you are ‘feeding the beast’? What was the situation? Were you able to shift away from this behaviour? How did you approach this? Share your experiences in the comments.