In our journey to empower teams with visibility and clarity, we are thrilled to reveal our newest addition to the development insights suite: Engineering Allocations.
By directly syncing with your GitHub labels, this powerful feature is designed to help engineering teams balance and track initiatives, allowing for better goal setting. Let’s take a look.
What is Engineering Allocation?
In a nutshell, engineering allocation is the strategic distribution of engineering resources, be it time, effort, or manpower, across various tasks or initiatives within a project or an organization.
Here’s why engineering teams should keep track of their engineering allocation:
- Visibility into investment: By closely monitoring where effort and time are being spent, engineering managers can get a clearer picture of their return on investment, leading to more informed decisions that align with org goals.
- Prioritization and planning: Effective engineering allocation can help you understand where you are in the development process, ensuring that your resources are going towards high-priority initiatives.
- Agile adaptability: With more visibility into engineering allocation, teams can quickly adapt to changes, reallocating resources as their project dynamics shift.
Introducing Engineering Allocations
Our Allocations view offers an intuitive approach to see where your engineering team spends their time and where the work is going. Apart from helping teams keep track of their initiatives, this feature also creates structure around workload distribution and prioritization.
How it works
After syncing with GitHub you will be able to establish ‘Initiatives,’ which are essentially GitHub labels assigned to track specific tasks. You can create a variety of these initiative labels such as ‘bugfixes’ or ‘docs’ and apply them to the relevant tasks.
To create a new initiative:
- Navigate to the dropdown menu under Allocations
- Select Add New Goal
- Select team(s)
- Create an initiative name and select the corresponding initiative(s) from the dropdown menu. These initiatives are labels in GitHub that you can add to your PR’s.
- Set target goals for your initiative(s). It’s the percentage of work you want to allocate to each initiative e.g. 30% to bug fixes and 70% to docs.
After you finish creating goals, the app then actively monitors the tasks (Github or Jira) and provides visual indicators showing (1) what proportion of tasks are associated with each initiative label and (2) whether they are below or above the goal. You can instantly spot if a certain category is falling below or exceeding the set target.
Note: At the moment ‘tasks’ represent PRs in GitHub. There are plans to integrate Jira tickets with this as well.
What’s it good for
The Allocations page provides users with a clear overview of how engineering time is distributed among various initiatives, based on the set goals. It can help your team manage workload by ensuring the balance between different types of initiatives is maintained. It’s particularly useful for planning, team workload management, and prioritization of initiatives.
With our Allocations feature, engineering teams will be able to answer key questions related to investments, such as:
- How much of our workload is spent on each initiative?
- Is there a balance in the allocation of initiatives according to the set goals?
- Are our engineers spending too much time on a specific initiative? Are engineers working on tech debt or an important new feature? For example, if your team struggles with keeping up with your release schedule, it might be worth taking a look at Allocations to see whether your engineers are getting sidetracked by other initiatives.
- Given the current distribution, should the team focus more on bug fixes? For example, if the current distribution indicates an over-investment in documentation and an under-investment in bug fixes, it’s a clear sign that the team needs to pivot its focus.
Conclusion
We’re hoping that the Allocations feature can give you a clearer picture of where your team is in the development process and help you balance and manage your team workload.
Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, happy sprinting!
We’re granting access to teams – request your access here.