By the way, you find my comment because I choose to describe what I’m doing it while I’m doing it. I guess others are adjusting estimates to make the red numbers disappear from the dashboard at the end of the sprint. If I remember correctly, starting the sprint with no overcommitment (i.e. red numbers) is a hard requirement (I don’t find it in the handbook but I read it in a task or document).
(Anyway my change above wasn’t just to make numbers match, it was because I thought the estimate you set there, 8 h, was too high for what remained).
In the past months we have low capacity so it’s not unexpected that there’s more work than people.
With Campus alone we’re overcommitted. We have extra budget in September and a timeline and we don’t have enough people to take tasks. First announced in chat. They mentioned yesterday they’d wished for something like 3 full-time people; I pinged Xavier about this (CC @antoviaque @tikr).
In addition, when there are people away, more work and roles go to the rest. 2 people away is noticeable.
A lot of extra Campus work fell on me and firefighters in the last sprints, there were a few incidents and requests. I can’t control that and I don’t have time to do all the work so I have tried to find help (e.g., request still open) and pass work to firefighters.
There’s more Campus work than what I can or want to do, so anyone who needs tasks, please ask in Mattermost.
There are duties that come from roles: from what I know, firefighting can’t be delayed or skipped or reduced (from 15 h) and it’s hard to pass to others because it’s 15 h. Other duties like recruitment, sustainability, client epics and epic updates, have specific dates when work should happen, and it can’t be delayed. Vacations can’t be skipped/reduced.
Sometimes a person is overcommitted and there’s no task that can be easily moved out. I see this happening from time to time, even in advance. E.g. sometimes I know in advance that a particular sprint will be heavy and can’t do much about that.
Taking tasks isn’t unilateral from us; clients have requirements and deadlines.
I think that with the reduced capacity, we need to ask more clients to wait and adjust their expectations/timelines to the cell’s capacity.
And we need to continue hiring.
It’s nice to say, but self-management is there for other reasons (as an alternative to middle managers), and we don’t have something like that to address health (to the contrary: being sick one day means you’ll probably need to recover the work and you’ll have a higher risk of spill-over). From what I know, the focus is rather on keeping commitments (and finishing sprints without spill-overs) and high quality.
Focusing on health would mean being able to say „I don’t feel like working on these tasks today; I need rest“ and being actually able to do it, without any consequences, other than not being paid for that work you didn’t do. In an organization where each person knows how to do many roles and is remote, that’s probably possible, but that’s another topic. But for now, I see that people’s focus has always been on finishing commitments, not on just doing X hours per week.
All this is my opinion only, about how it could be; and I’m brainstorming, and sorry if it’s a bit off-topic.
It would also be great if all tasks were correctly estimated, including unknown incidents/requests and sprint injections, so that you plan X hours and they actually take X hours. I hope we can learn more about that or measure how well the numbers match the reality. We could start by asking whether initial commitments are matching the reality.