{"id":14211,"date":"2024-06-10T09:31:38","date_gmt":"2024-06-10T08:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ee.yelkdev.site\/?p=14211"},"modified":"2025-03-31T12:04:44","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T11:04:44","slug":"unplanned-tech-work-team-capacity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/blog\/our-thinking\/unplanned-tech-work-team-capacity\/","title":{"rendered":"Why unplanned tech work kills team capacity"},"content":{"rendered":"

I speak with customers across the Equal Experts network<\/a>, to understand their scaling problems. When I\u2019m asked \u2018why don\u2019t my teams have enough capacity to deliver\u2019, or \u2018what\u2019s the business benefit of standardization\u2019, my answers usually mention unplanned tech work. It reduces your value-add time, and if you don\u2019t measure it, it\u2019ll silently kill team capacity.<\/p>\n

I once visited a British telco where 20 teams were building digital services on GCP. A delivery manager told me \u201cfeatures are slow to reach customers and we don\u2019t know why\u201d. When I suggested measuring utilised capacity as value-add time versus non-value-add time, the manager predicted an 80\/20 split. They were horrified when our calculations showed a 20\/80 split, with teams averaging 80% of their time on unplanned tech work!<\/p>\n\"\"\n

What is unplanned tech work, why was it silently killing team capacity at this telco, and how did they start to turn the situation around?<\/p>\n

The impact of unplanned tech work<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s start with some definitions:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Measure<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\nDescription<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\nType<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Capacity<\/td>\nMaximum amount of time available for work<\/td>\nTime period<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Utilisation<\/td>\nActual capacity used for any work<\/td>\nPercentage<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Utilised capacity<\/td>\nActual amount of time available for work<\/td>\nTime period<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Value-add time<\/td>\nUtilised capacity for value-adding product work<\/td>\nPercentage<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Non-value-add time<\/td>\nUtilised capacity for non-value-adding tech work<\/td>\nPercentage<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

 <\/p>\n

At Equal Experts, we often see teams being asked to estimate their capacity, but it\u2019s fixed in advance by team size, working days in a time period, etc. Asking how much capacity is available for value-adding work is more interesting, because that\u2019s controllable, and unplanned tech work has a bigger impact on planned product work than people realise.<\/p>\n

Product work is about creating propositions, products, and services to satisfy business demand and user needs. Planned tech work is proactive tech initiatives, and routine BAU maintenance. Unplanned tech work is reactive fixes and emergency maintenance. Examples include configuration errors, defects, deployment failures, environment issues, security vulnerabilities, and test failures. You might know this as break\/fix work, or rework.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

More unplanned tech work means lower technical quality, slower delivery speed, and more reliability problems. This was proven by Dr. Nicole Forsgren et al in Accelerate<\/a>, which showed high-performing organizations spend 29% less time on unplanned tech work. It also found that Continuous Delivery practices like frequent deployments are a predictor of low unplanned tech work. As unplanned tech work decreases, more time is available for planned product work.<\/p>\n

Unplanned tech work is a silent killer<\/h2>\n

When we speak with customers about modern engineering practices like You Build It You Run It<\/a>, their biggest worry is teams would spend all their time on non-value-adding work, like an operations team. But there\u2019s little awareness of how much time their teams are already spending on unplanned tech work. We believe this is because it is:<\/p>\n