Since moving to a fully remote model, our old ways of "walking the floor" to see who is busy are gone. Our current utilization reports are based on manual timesheets, which are often inaccurate or filled out at the last minute. What tools or methodologies are you using to get an honest, real-time view of team bandwidth without coming across as a "micromanager" to your staff?
3 answers
We moved away from "hours worked" and started measuring "Task Velocity" and "Story Point Completion." In a remote setup, output is a much better indicator of utilization than time. We use an integrated dashboard that pulls data from Jira and GitHub. If a developer's "In Progress" column is full but no code is being committed, we know there is a bottleneck or an over-allocation issue. We also hold "Office Hours" where team members can flag if they are "Red" (overloaded), "Yellow" (at capacity), or "Green" (available). This self-reporting combined with data gives us a 90% accuracy rate.
Do you find that measuring velocity alone ignores the time spent on "unplanned work" like meetings or production support?
We use a simple color-coded "Heat Map" in our project management software that updates based on task assignments and deadlines.
Heat maps are excellent for a quick visual check. It makes it very easy for leadership to see where the burn-out risks are during a sprint.
Steven, you hit the nail on the head. To account for that, we allocate a "Maintenance Bucket" of 20% of everyone's time for administrative tasks and unplanned work. We only plan our project resources at 80% capacity. If the "unplanned" work starts eating into the project time, it shows up immediately in our velocity trends. It’s essential to realize that a 100% utilized resource is actually a project risk, not a goal.