Many organizations in which I’ve coached are concerned when the people on their teams aren’t being “utilized” at 100% of their capacity. This is bad, because a team’s capacity is simply a multiple of the number of team members and the number hours available to be utilized.
A Thought Exercise
When the CPU on your computer reaches 100% utilization, what happens?
- Your computer slows down. Significantly.
- The network to which your computer is connected is running at 100% capacity. The equipment moving the packets of data about will experience numerous collisions and will have to send requests back to your computer to resend data.
Learn to say, “No.”
If we don’t say no, we take on too much, our processing and communication ability suffers, and we end up disappointing those we are trying to help.
- Take breaks – brief diversions clear our mind and allow us to work better afterwards.
Conclusion
Software development requires substantially different ways to make teams and the individual people on them as productive as possible.
- There is no magic number for what percentage of utilization is best. People are variable and 90% utilization for a person might be fine on a given day while %30 is all that the same person can handle on the next.
Why does anyone think that 100% utilization is a good thing?
If we’re pushing individuals and teams to 100% capacity, the quality of work and therefore the productivity of the team will be reduced
- Productivity of the knowledge worker is not a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important
- People under time pressure don’t think faster
For a team:
Pull less work into a sprint even if velocity says you should be able to pull more
- Extra time can be used to increase the quality of work completed
- Increased quality means decreased rework, which means the team delivers faster in the long term
- Minimize meetings where people are on their phones
