Level the workload for development team leads

Incoming work.

If you work in IT you know that some days it feels like work requests appear from every direction possible and then some. The IT group is a service organization at its core and there is a strong drive to satisfy all customer requests in a timely manner.

For the development group within IT, incoming work results in new projects to create code, fix defects, or mitigate security vulnerabilities. It’s very easy to over allocate the development team leads because the natural tendency and customer desire is to solve all the requests quickly. Inevitably, unchecked incoming work will overburden a development team lead. That creates a large bottleneck in the flow of work and then the rate of production code pushes becomes erratic as the amount of work-in-progress increases!

Load level.

Many modern workflow systems, including Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints show the benefit of leveling the load within a production system. Effectively, the idea is to eliminate overburden on people and machines to make production more even and eliminate wastes. In my IT shop we have evolved to a regular prioritization meeting to review current projects in progress, prioritize work not started, and look at the allocation of team leads responsible for executing the work. The intent of the meeting is to level the load of current work that the team is processing.

But the team lead assignment review is a newer component of our process. We realized that even though we were meeting to assign priorities to projects that we had not considered the capacity of the team lead when assigning work. Initially, we looked at the capacity of the entire team and quickly overburdened our team leads. This clog of work stressed our team leads and disrupted the flow of work output for the team.

Now we look at our active work and continuously ask the question, “Have we over allocated our team lead in this area?” When the lead has capacity for new work then it’s pulled from the backlog of prioritized project requests.

This is a simplified look at a much larger concept, but an easy practical step to implement. Maybe it will spring an idea for you to use if you face the issue of over allocation.

Onward and Upward!