TL;DR: Over the last year we’ve had an incredible year of growth. However we’ve been having difficulty adding new core members at the rate we’re adding work. This is causing an overall load issue we need to address, and I’m soliciting ideas from the group. Please post them here.
I had intended to write this forum post next week but am finding that the issues that we’re seeing would benefit from this discussion starting as early as possible since they may involve taking actions that do not yield results immediately, but the problem is acute.
We have not managed to confirm a new core member in the last several months. We are working hard to recruit new members, but our high standards mixed with a low number of overall applications has meant that few have been confirmed. I’m of the mind that we cannot lower our standards-- the fact that I can hand any member a critical task and expect it to get done right is core to the camaraderie and culture of this team.
OpenCraft values its members. We have traditionally been able to provide an excellent work-life balance but this has chipped away in recent months. Since I joined, about three to four people have suddenly had to stop work due to burnout. Others are rapidly trying to shed epics or roles because they know they cannot deliver on all commitments, but are finding difficulty with others picking up the tasks.
If you’ve felt like you’re failing over the last few sprints to deliver on everything that’s expected of you, you’re not alone. While there is always some improvement to be made on time management, the organization as a whole is starting to have difficulty meeting all commitments on time. Because each individual is self-managing, those of us who have learned the hard way to rescope responsibility in the face of impossible commitments are shedding it more quickly than it can be picked back up. Those of us still learning this are quietly taking on more work and getting crushed by it until they burn out.
In the latter case, the sudden drop in hours caused by those team members dropping out can lead to cascade failures as others pick up the slack. (This is a reminder to speak up early if you’re feeling overworked! We’d rather rescope your work than you suffer psychological injury. It’s not too late to talk about it now, I promise!)
Even if we all were properly rescoping work, we would be facing long delays in starting projects due to these issues with capacity. More time is being spent on overhead managing the dwindling available time. Spending time context switching and planning like this instead of doing deep work accelerates burnout.
There are three main ways to deal with capacity issues:
- Increase hiring
- We’re currently working hard on this, but as mentioned, we’ve not had members confirmed in a while. If we’re going to push this angle, it may mean rethinking how much time we allocate to recruiting, or else finding novel ways to attract talent.
- Rescope work
- The traditional way we’ve handled being overloaded is by pretending OCIM and related internal tools don’t exist and otherwise deferring non-critical maintenance. This makes us all unhappy-- it often results in technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to pay off. Aside from that, it’s been one of our goals this year to improve our internal tooling and allocate hours that we have banked to these non-billable projects.
- Another option might be telling clients they will need to wait a few months for us to start on tasks. This could be a reputational hit, and for some clients the delay might be business critical. However we have built a great deal of goodwill and some projects that aren’t as need critical to clients may be willing to wait a bit longer since they like our quality of work and won’t want to look elsewhere.
- Reduce the number of incoming projects until capacity is otherwise under control.
- This is harder than it sounds because adding new projects is like hiring: It can take a long time to get a project onboard, and it can take months (sometimes years) to land a sale of significance. Suddenly ceasing intake could resolve the problem after a while but then leave us with a drought a few months down the line, which is also bad. We haven’t had a sale in a few months, but…
- I’m getting better and better at sales and currently have several promising leads. I might land several in short succession soon. After working these clients for an extended period I would prefer to not turn them away. Then again, there’s no guarantee any of them will sign, either.
- I could work to communicate with clients that the start time will be delayed for new projects. That might cause some of them to turn away on their own and the patient to wait.
One thing that occurs to me is that since I haven’t yet completed a major sale, I’m a little fuzzy on the new client onboarding process. It’s my understanding that cells decide what work they will take on, but I don’t feel I have a great view of knowing which cell is likely to take on more work and how soon they can do so. Is there any standard way of doing that? If not, what are some ideas we have? They could help prevent issues like this in the future.
So-- which angle of attack sounds best to each of you? What things might we try? What things should we avoid doing?
We can get better at that.
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what I meant, of course, was that I didn’t think it was necessary to ask for permission and went ahead; by contrast, I’m pretty sure many developers don’t work in an environment where that’s possible.