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Balancing capability and capacity between individual and collective requirements #2

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Arlodotexe opened this issue Dec 29, 2024 · 0 comments
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areas::processes::execution Low-level task execution areas::processes::planning High-level strategy and planning tasks::review::design Setup, architecture or design patterns tasks::review::performance Resource usage and efficiency

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Arlodotexe commented Dec 29, 2024

Balanced capability/capacity fosters proactive planning, whereas persistent misalignment forces teams into reactive “firefighting” and extended delays.

This document provides a performance and structural review of planning and high-level management for capabilities and capacity.

First noted in #1, there are conceptual dynamics between "capability" and "capacity" that can be analyzed and understood to help make high-level planning more effective.

Defining terms

  • Capability: The degree to which an individual or team has the skills, knowledge and competence to effectively perform a specific task or perform within a specific area or timeframe.
  • Capacity: The degree to which an individual or team has the bandwidth, time and resources to carry out a specific task or perform within a specific area or timeframe.

It's useful to think of these in terms as loosely interchangeable with their defining terms: [skills, knowledge, competence] for Capability, and [bandwidth, time resources] for Capacity.

Organizing and examining the terms

In this scenario, capability and capacity are each plotted on a 2D matrix with four quadrants, reflecting two contexts:

  • One for individual capability/capacity (availability)
  • One for collective capability/capacity (requirements)

Each set is organized into 2d space with four quadrants each, as follows.

The Compass(es): Individually available capability/capacity

  • (capacity -1, capability 1) Bottleneck. Misaligned capacity. Increased risk of burnout, reduced capability, and increased ticket debt.
  • (capacity -1, capability -1) Overwhelm. Misaligned capability and capacity. Risk of burnout, reduced capability realized. Increased risk of mistakes or missed deadlines.
  • (capacity 1, capability 1) Stable. No misalignment. Reliable, enables best work. Ideal.
  • (capacity 1, capability -1) Misaligned capability. Missing knowledge, "slack", growth opportunities, or misaligned capability allocation.

Table representation of the cartesian grid:

Available Capacity -1 (Low) Available Capacity +1 (High)
Available Capability +1 (High) Bottleneck
Increased risk of burnout, ticket debt
Stable
No misalignment, reliable, ideal
Available Capability -1 (Low) Overwhelm
Risk of burnout realized, increased risk of mistakes and missed deadlines
Misaligned Capability
Missing knowledge, slack, growth opportunities

The Map: Collectively required capability/capacity

  • (capacity -1, capability 1) Non-trivial, specialized changes.
  • (capacity -1, capability -1) Trivial, quick and simple changes.
  • (capacity 1, capability 1) Stable operation. More flexibility in task types allocated.
  • (capacity 1, capability -1) Trivial, repetitive or labor-intensive changes.

Table representation of the cartesian grid:

Required Capacity -1 (Low) Required Capacity +1 (High)
Required Capability +1 (High) Non-trivial, specialized changes Stable Operation
Flexible to all change types, including non-trivial labor-consuming changes
Required Capability -1 (Low) Trivial, quick and simple changes Trivial, repetitive or labor-consuming changes

With these in hand, we begin to examine how best to integrate the two in the context of mass collaborative planning and task execution.

Balancing

In short, the "compasses" tell you where the team is on a "map" of its capability and capacity-- it tells you what kind of changes they're collectively capable of making given each individuals' state.

In practice, balancing these helps planners answer the questions:

  • Where do responsibilities lie, and how are tasks assigned to those with both capability and capacity in mind?
  • Do the skills/bandwidth of required tasks (collective) match the available skills/bandwidth of individuals?
  • When individual capability or capacity isn't "stable", how do we shift to accommodate?
    • Capacity: Delegation or reallocation. Ignored capacity issues (bottlenecks) usually leads to burnout and reduced capability.
    • Capability: Training or upskilling. Ignoring capability issues leads to increased task execution time and possible tech debt.

Insights for collective planning

Key points:

  • Enable team-level responsibility mapping and planning
  • Facilitate forecasting and load balancing of individual task execution based on collective needs, set by the planners
  • Create proactive bottleneck and burnout buffers for contributors
  • Identify potential reallocation, upskilling or growth opportunities at the individual level.
  • Augment with standardized knowledge-sharing to prevent single points of failure (documentation, social, general, expertise)
    • Consistent stability is a low-risk opportunity for strategic role rotation, knowledge-sharing and upskilling.
  • Address both short-term delays and long-term health, ensuring quality work can be delivered continuously.

Proactive vs Reactive

The freedom or constraint to act proactively or reactively is a side-effect of improperly balancing capability and capacity.

  • If capability and capacity are well-balanced, you gain more freedom to anticipate and plan-- a proactive approach.
  • If capability or capacity are misaligned, you'll spend your time dealing with the side effects of that ("putting out fires")-- a reactive approach.

When misalignments are persistent, the balance between proactive and reactive efforts skew in favor of reactive firefighting.
Conversely, when capacity and capabilities are balanced, the team has the flexibility to think ahead and proactively address issues before they happen.

To neatly tie this off, here's a brief analysis between "Proactive" and "Reactive":

Aspect Reactive Proactive
Cause - Problem discovery
- External events
- Anticipation of problems
- Anticipation of opportunities
Nature - Unplanned, responsive
- Urgent, disruptive
- Planned, strategic
- Controlled, enables resource allocation
Risk - Bottlenecks and resource burn - Investments may not materialize
- Proactive bottlenecks and is bottlenecked by reactive.
- Proactive leads may be early
Outcome - Short-term stability - Long-term stability, health

Planner/contributor engagement

This doesn't try to model engagement. It assumes full engagement from planners and contributors both, then examines how they can become misaligned.

If you need to model engagement, model it separately. However, keep in mind that ideal engagement arises from organic and honest interactions, and engineering it yourself carries a higher risk and maintenance cost that usually isn't worth it.

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