Under-accounting happens when the team works on unexpected tasks. This happens a lot to teams who are responsible for a lot of technical debt, maintain a support queue, or have a lot of stakeholders asking for “quick” fixes and features. It also happens to any team being asked for any kind of work.

How To Identify Under-Accounting

Ask yourself: does your team routinely take on work you didn’t plan for? If the answer is ‘Yes,’ then you might be under accounting.

Other forms of under-accounting include the following:

• Not planning around vacation time
• Not planning for time spent on operational support work
• Not accounting for launch support time
• Not accounting for non-engineering work: interviewing, performance reviews, etc.
• Not accounting for “papercuts” aka little bug fixes that aren't specific to a particular project.

How To Address the Problem

1. Do your homework. Write down everything your team is responsible for and figure out where your time is going. I do this by using a capacity planner
2. Once you have sorted out where the time on your team is going, align this with leadership.

Alignment with leadership

Work with your leadership team and stakeholders to check that your team is working on the right things at the right time. Communicate up about the kinds of work that takes time away from your team’s expected project delivery capacity.

• How many project workstreams do you have? If you have as many ongoing projects as engineers, you have a problem.
• How many priorities does your team have? Are you all aligned on what these are?
• How much time are you really spending on operational support debt? Are you spending enough or too much time?
• Is your team staffed correctly?

Capacity planner

My preferred mechanism for tracking my team’s allocations is a capacity planner. Generally, I do not show this capacity planner to engineers; it’s simply too much information. Other teams might find this level of visibility useful. I do share with them the high-level direction the team is going in. If your engineers can’t answer “what’s next for me after this project?” you may face demotivation and lack of purpose.

On the left is a list of all the distinct projects. I might even break a project into very high-level phases such as New Service Design Phase, New Service Build Phase, and New Service Launch phase. I also include tracking for Out of Office (OOO) and mandatory maintenance, aka Keeping the Lights On (KTLO). Sometimes, mandatory maintenance tasks are actually large enough to be tracked as projects in and of themselves.

Each column represents a week of time.

I allocate several engineers to a project per week. Each week, the number of engineers allocated should add up to the number of engineers on my team. I can see at a glance where the team is over-allocated and where the team is under-allocated.