Has remote working impacted capacity planning?

Talent Sourcing & Hiring Availability & Capacity Management Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

3.6k views21 Comments

Director of IT in Software, 1,001 - 5,000 employees

I've been thinking a lot about capacity, but there doesn't seem to be any redefinition of it now that we’re remote. People have adopted a psychic distance around capacity, for example, when they're looking at a number of different initiatives they're trying to drive in a certain period of time. At the outset of planning, everybody thinks we should be able to do all these things, but it’s because they're not seeing the actual people, the impact of the change and the need for business. They just think that since we're not commuting, we have an extra seven hours in our week and we can fit in another project. It's frustrating when people have lost sight of the actual work resources it takes to do these projects until you're already in them. At that point, people start to say, “How are we going to get all of this done? Why didn't we think about this before?”

2 Replies

CIO in Manufacturing, 1,001 - 5,000 employees

It’s difficult to set those boundaries, because we're all one instant message away. People send a Slack or text message here and there, and then it's like people start to assume everyone's available 24 hours a day to work on the 15 projects that we plan to finish this quarter. That piece has weighed on me, because burnout is real.

Director of IT in Software, 1,001 - 5,000 employees

Burnout is very real. I've been creating loyalty on my team by being super empathetic. When an organization is still in the process of growing into what will be an enterprise-size company, it’s tough to drive as if you already have the same capacity or resources that an enterprise does. Shockwaves from that hit the team and it shows. They’ll say, “Do you know how much we have on our plates?” You have to shift your leadership style based on the current situation in order to drive productivity and get the results that you want.

Chief Technology Officer in Healthcare and Biotech, 1,001 - 5,000 employees

Yes, it's become more chaotic than previously. Part of this is due to the lack of being in a room and working together, seeing the problems people encounter and other unplanned work that arises, and just having that general sense of where time goes.

However, another part appears to be processes falling down - we now get stories that are incomplete or not well-scoped and thus cannot be properly estimated, but yet are instructed these are high priority and must be acted on. We get multiple calendar invites from executives for ad-hoc "problem of the day" meetings right on top of standups or sprint planning/review sessions - despite these being in our calendar and the calendar clearly showing we are busy.

I think that remote working has massively increased the quantity and length of Teams/Zoom meetings and it is heavily impacting productivity, making things fall behind or be short-circuited.

There needs to be a pause-and-reflect, to give time to breathe and then to reset and redesign these processes in a new asynchronous, highly-distributed working model.

Solutions Architect in Software, 501 - 1,000 employees

Initially, when there were a lot of changes during these first few weeks/months, there was some disruption, but everybody just got used to it through time.

VP of Engineering in Education, 201 - 500 employees

The impact on ICs hasn't been too significant - the regular cadence of team ceremonies continues. However, we have had to learn new and different ways to stay engaged, dig deeper, and to ensure that teams are working together effectively. The impact on managers has been different - as David Williams pointed out, the proliferation of status/sync meetings has increased and lengthened days significantly; the "real" work only starts when all the meetings are done. We have to be more intentional about choosing what meetings should happen, how to schedule them in blocks, how to better leverage technology to _not_ have a meeting, and provide blocks of time for managers to learn and iterate strategically.

Chief Techical Officer in Software, 11 - 50 employees

Nothing has really changed, resources are still resources, plans are still plans, needs are still needs. Projects are still the same projects. What has changed is the amount of flexibility of the resources available and the flexibility of those resources.

Chief Technologist in Telecommunication, 10,001+ employees

We leveraged this new paradigm to expand employee horizon. We are all experiencing new challenges everyday on-line or off-line as the world is now becoming smaller and we all need to be available 24x7. So, an evolving challenge is how to coach our employee to better manage their capacity to meet the needs of family and work.

Sr. Director of Engineering in Software, 51 - 200 employees

There are several aspects to be taken care (carry more weightage than before) like burnouts, lack of instant availability, increased choatism during making estimations and planning. The parameter of uncertainty has definitely increased in value and is going to affect as well. Then there are indirect factors like increased attrition, work life balance, social disconnect etc.. that are going to play a role in overall calculations.

Director of Engineering in Software, 51 - 200 employees

It hasn't for us. Even before the pandemic, we were a remote first company, and hence our transition to being fully remote wasn't as challenging in terms of processes. What we did see impacting the work initially for engineers (and hence the capacity planning) who were not used to working remote was the unstable internet bandwidth. However we were largely able to mitigate that by providing them the home office setup cost like moving to better ISPs in their area and paying for UPS setup amongst other things.

Chief Technology Officer in Software, 11 - 50 employees

There were definitely teething issues and there continue to be several challenges. The trend seems to be that employees are working much longer hours but are not necessarily more productive. The inconsistency in output makes capacity planning a challenge.

Chief Technology Officer in Transportation, 501 - 1,000 employees

Remote working in when lockdowns were there used to work out very well, because there weren't too many distractions. People used work, focus on their health and spend time with their families.

With the world opening too many distractions have crept up and people haven't been mindful enough not to take those during work hours. Anyone can schedule their work hours as per the lifestyle but during those work hours it should focused work. Particularly in engg where you need focused time to code/solve a problem too many distractions become a cause of bugs and things getting delayed.

As part of the process, we try and manage it through a tight agile process but still sometimes quality goes for a toss.

Working through a different space and at fixed times creates that split which allows to you to focused and deep work and which until and unless is there in remote environment will always impact productivity. For the same amount of work, you need more people and more people create more redundancy and quality compromise within the system.

Hence, remote work has definitely impacted capacity planning.