Protect The Team From Being Overburdened
Follow Scientific Method Rather Than Your Intuition
“Don’t let anyone of the team be idle”, a manager had said …
“I don’t know whether my estimated time is correct or not, I just know you want me to give you an estimation to report”, a colleague just replied …
For many technical professionals, but not limited, they may face situations where team members are overloaded with work or experiencing burnout due to poor workload management.
Yeah, I was once had a hard time in managing overloaded work, and I cannot but think if there were other rational approaches to handle the issue, because most people are too busy to think of the better methods but abide by the existing patterns to face similar situations.
Well, repetitive false patterns won’t lead to correct results.
In my opinion, I would suggest you take 3 approaches to improving the overloading conditions.
👉 Use Story Burn-Down Trend
I know many people are familiar with the story points applied to estimate the workload of an item, and we could observe the burn-down of story points to evaluate the overall productivity of the team. In this way, the team could select sufficient amount of product backlogs to avoid overloads.
👉 Use Lead Time Statistics
This is similar to time estimation but the concept is different from what we usually think of. The lead time is the duration between an item is committed and is delivered, and not the upfront estimation. I would like to go through 3 ~ 4 iterations to know the statistics data of items of different categories. Therefore I could predict how much time we might need to deliver the associative items, and make corresponding adaptation to the launch date.
👉 Limit Work-In-Progress (WIP)
And limiting WIP might the most favorable one. In our work process, we need to restrict the number of work items in each stage to ensure the system throughput could achieve a steady state, and each stage should not be overburdened lest it should damage the productivity of a team.
Often, we seem to be busy but deliver less outcome, because there must be something stuck in the process.
I hope my suggestions could give you some insights and reflections about improving your conditions, and feel free to comment below or send a private message to me.
By the way, now I am developing an online course about agile project management for those who’d like to transition to PM roles. So I provide an 1–1 free online consulting service for people who need help with their project management issues.
If needed, never hesitate to reserve a web call with me through the below link. Anyone who reserve for the call would be rewarded with a free material to improve your project management skills.
Let Me Help You
👉 Book now: https://calendly.com/uragilecoach/consulting
⚠️ Remember to send me a message through one of the social platforms (LinkedIn, IG, Twitter, Reddit) within 1 hour, otherwise the reservation might be canceled.
🎁 Anyone who reserves for the web call would be rewarded with a secret gift that helps you grow on project management skills.
If you acknowledge the value I share with you, do as below:
1. 👏 the article
2. subscribe me for latest contents
3. reply to the post, any responses are inspiring
4. follow me on other platforms for further information
- IG: @ur_agile_coach
- Podcast: Agile Rocket
- Youtube: Your Agile Coach
- LinkedIn: Tsung-Hsiang Wu
- Twitter: @ur_agile_coach
