From now on, non-billable cell accounts have a budget set. Details about the 10 accounts involved and their initial budgets. Actually it’s 11 accounts now, including Ocim, devops, meetings, prospects, …
The budgets will be refined in future sustainability updates by the sustainability managers, or when needed. Setting the budgets involves a lot of coordination, because many cells may use each account, and many epics in each cell may use it, and sometimes a few tasks outside the epic use it too.
Everyone —but mostly, epic owners— will need to get involved in budget discussions to arrive to a global number that works as budget for that account. To simplify, I think we could start with a simpler approach and just discuss when whether to raise or lower the first initial numbers. These first numbers have been set by extrapolating the previous months (spreadsheet with tests). I’d suggest to wait until all sustainability reports have been posted, and then discuss budgets with the sustainability managers.
If you have an epic that uses a non-billed account and haven’t set a budget to it, now it’s a good idea to do it, to keep the unbilled hours under control. You can look at the global account budget set for reference, see how the budget is shared through cells and epics, and set a lower number.
Of course, setting a budget to devops won’t stop the fires; I can’t do anything there.
And we still don’t have the concept of „cell budget“ in the Sprints app, so we can’t represent things like „of the 100 h global budget, 20 h is for Serenity, 40 h for Falcon, 40 h for Bebop“. So we aren’t doing or enforcing this split budget.
This new concept (unbilled account budgets) doesn’t affect overhead computations, nor sustainability ratios. Unbilled hours are unbilled hours, independently of whether they’re over the monthly goal. „Overhead“ is for billed accounts. This new concept is just about budget excesses.
Task to log time: SE-4025 for this post. And your cell’s sustainability task (FAL-277, SE-249, BB-284) for later discussions about budgets.