Common problems with balancing engineering investment

Swarmia investment balance helps you answer many questions that engineering organisations struggle with.

When organizations mature and grow, more things start to compete for teams' attention. This can result in teams spreading their focus too thin, and not being able to spend enough time on their top priorities.

It's easy to imagine the difference between a team spending 20% of their time towards a goal versus one that spends 40%: the time to deliver a solution at least doubles. This isn't good news for the team or the organization – but there's a massive opportunity on the flip side: teams who can improve roadmap focus can drastically improve their impact.

Here are some questions Investment Balance can help you answer:

• Are you spending less than 50% of your time on high priorities? Little time spent on the most important category might mean your team has too many things to focus on, or that it's not clear how to progress further with the important projects.

• Is a majority of your time going to bug fixing and maintenance work? An increasing trend in the amount of bug fixing and maintenance work can indicate a problem with the team health. This might require an action such as investing into infrastructure, or addressing some of the technical debt the team has accrued.

• Are you spending an increasing amount of time with ad hoc tasks? When organizations and systems grow, complexity grows with them. It's sometimes easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of goals, opportunities and the difficulty of getting complex problems solved. This can cause teams and individuals to fall back to simple, reactive tasks which are easy to complete, but time spent on them might not maximize the impact of the team.

• Do you have a lot of unlinked work? Drawing good conclusions without transparency to a major share of the work can be difficult. Creating routines to link issues and pull requests, and categorizing ad hoc work, pays off and enables the team to make well-informed decisions to improve their performance.

Look out for decreasing trends in the most important work. This increases your odds of catching a problem early and correcting course before it becomes a real problem.