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Many roles and cross-skills. #32

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@hallmansm

Pre-amble: Once again, I'm in love with this tool. I can't stop playing with it. I'm consolidating some things here.

  1. I've made myself an Excel spreadsheet as a "cheat sheet" to help me build out team structures. I'm trying to show a team of 12, and alterations to that Base Team. Then I want to show the cost of the team (avg person cost xN) if I brute force throughput through adding twice as many people (Team of 24). Then I'm doing different scenarios with the Base Team, like WIP throttling only. Cross-skilling in various combinations (1 out of 8 devs, half the devs, all the devs, etc.). Growing N people smartly, and assuming the added person is cross-skilled etc. What I'm essentially showing is brute force costs 200%, but the return is only 98%. So we lose 2% scalable productivity every time we double the budget.
  2. The point of all this, the spreadsheet helps me define my team structures, and shortcuts like "ux, ux, ux, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, dev+qa, qa, qa, qa" This gets unwieldy.
  3. It would be amazing to have some kind of interface to define each skill, and just enter a number.
  4. Then, a cross-skill grid. Check boxes. Might not be able to combine both of those.
  5. Save set teams. "Base Team". "Brute Force double all roles" team. "Cross skill 1/2 developers" team. "WIP throttling only" team. "Small growth, WIP throttling, 50% cross-training" team. Saved scenario teams, ability to load them instantly by checking the saved team for instance and then run the sim.
  6. The labels for the comparative metrics scrolls off the left of the page when you run enough. Would be nice if the labels were static and a contained frame on the right scrolled.
  7. Entering budgets for teams. Could be simple "avg cost per person" or...
  8. Tailored to each role separately. This could have profound implications if a problem can be solved with a less costly role, (combined with WIP throttling, and cross-training), instead of assuming a team must brute force increases in throughput by picking the wrong (expensive) role.
  9. If budget and throughput metrics are now on the table, cost efficiency becomes easily calculable. "You've gained 98% throughput at the cost of $N per item". Cost of cutting cycle time, cost of cutting WIP, cost of increasing throughput.
  10. Maybe highlighting with colors, highest and lowest resource utilization (role).
  11. I've played with optimal WIP by manually adjusting up and down, looking for the sweet spot. This could be automated. "Find my optimal WIP given this current team".

Again, I'm giddy with excitement. I'm willing to throw money at you, but honestly I can't afford much. =)
BTW, I was excitedly telling Tim Ottinger about this, and he said he knew you. So "Hi!" from Tim.

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