# Investment balance {% embed url="" %} ## Overview Building software products is a balancing act. To build sustainably, engineering teams must balance short-term and long-term goals, as well as new features, technical debt, and productivity improvements. Investment balance helps engineering organizations get visibility into how they allocate their efforts across different priorities and identify where improvements can be made: * Leadership can decide which teams need more headcount * Engineering Managers and Product Managers keep different priorities in balance * Developers can make a business case for a technical improvement project ## Setup Swarmia creates a [Balance](https://www.swarmia.com/blog/balancing-engineering-investments/) breakdown by default, but you can create up to 5 breakdowns. Each breakdown has its own set of categories, for which you [define rules to categorize work](https://help.swarmia.com/configuring-investment-categories). If you have a paid Swarmia plan, you can also enable [AI categorization](https://help.swarmia.com/settings/organization/investment-balance/automatic-categorization), which will categorize work based on your category descriptions in addition to any rules you've applied. We don’t expect perfect issue-tracking hygiene, as Swarmia includes automated and manual tools to improve data quality. Your team will need to [link pull requests to issues](https://help.swarmia.com/how-do-i-link-pull-requests-to-issues-in-practice) using one of the supported mechanisms to improve accuracy. ## Using the investment balance In Swarmia, you can create multiple investment breakdowns, define custom categories, and add custom rules to automatically attribute work to categories. For the primary investment breakdown, investment balance can be viewed on the organization, team, and individual levels. We recommend starting with [the Balance framework](https://www.swarmia.com/blog/balancing-engineering-investments/), which splits the work into four categories: * **New things:** new products and features * **Improvements:** enhancing existing features, tools, or business processes * **Productivity:** making it easier to get work done in the future * **Keeping the lights on (KTLO):** maintaining existing systems and services A healthy balance is to allocate 10-15% of the effort to productivity and keep KTLO under 30%. The remaining 60% can be invested in new things and improvements based on your objectives. Start by configuring [your first categorization rules](https://help.swarmia.com/configuring-investment-categories), and then head to [investment balance overview](https://app.swarmia.com/investment), select a team, and review the categorized and uncategorized work. Once your highest-level work items are categorized (e.g. initiatives or epics), Swarmia will process the issue hierarchy automatically to auto-categorize all remaining child issues and related coding contributions. After the initial setup, data in balance views is updated in real-time.

Creating an investment breakdown

Flexible categorization rules

## Taking action Decide on the initial breakdown and aim to achieve at least 80% categorization using automated categorization rules. Consider using a binary breakdown, such as Planned vs. Unplanned work for an easier start. Consider establishing a convention for labeling your highest-level work items in your issue tracker. Additionally, review your highest-level uncategorized items and the largest investments in each investment category at least once a month. Introduce the concept of investment balance to teams and facilitate discussions on the ideal balance they should strive for. If teams are struggling with maintaining essential operations (*keeping the lights on*), ensure they have the necessary support and strategies in place. Swarmia provides [a working agreement to help teams categorize work](https://app.swarmia.com/working-agreements/explore/pull-request-linking) through timely Slack and Microsoft Teams reminders. These reminders are triggered only for work that wasn’t categorized by automated filters, minimizing context switch. Swarmia provides additional views for viewing and balancing investment efforts: * [Work Log](https://app.swarmia.com/work) helps teams prioritize their daily efforts. * [Focus Summary](https://app.swarmia.com/insights/focus) shows the distribution of effort across different initiatives. * [Developer Overview](https://app.swarmia.com/overview) helps individuals understand their personal investment balance. ### Common problems with balancing engineering investment As organizations mature and grow, more things compete for teams' attention. This can result in teams spreading their focus too thin and not spending 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 that can improve their roadmap focus can drastically increase their impact.** Here are some questions Investment Balance can help you answer: * **Are you spending less than 50% of your time on high priorities?** Spending little time on the most important category might mean your team has too many things to focus on, or that it's not clear how to move forward with the key projects. * **Is a majority of your time going to bug fixing and maintenance work?** An increasing trend in bug fixes and maintenance work can indicate a problem with the team's health. This might require an action such as investing in infrastructure or addressing some of the technical debt the team has accrued. * **Are you spending more time on ad hoc tasks?** As organizations and systems grow, so does complexity. It's sometimes easy to get overwhelmed by the number of goals, opportunities, and the difficulty of solving complex problems. This can cause teams and individuals to fall back on simple, reactive tasks that are easy to complete, but time spent on them might not maximize the team's impact. * **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 to categorize ad hoc work, pays off and enables the team to make well-informed decisions to improve 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. ## Further reading * Tools that help you [improve focus in your team](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow0acM--NqM) * Model for [measuring engineering effort](https://help.swarmia.com/effort) in Swarmia * Learn more from our [blog](https://www.swarmia.com/blog/balancing-engineering-investments/) --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://help.swarmia.com/features/focus/balance-engineering-investments.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.