The best way to visualize and manage people (resource) utilization in Favro is with a dedicated product team, teams-of-teams, or even company-wide utilization board. Since cards in Favro - representing tasks or deliverables - can exist in multiple places, if you need to track utilization, it makes sense to aggregate cards that exist on multiple boards, possibly across multiple teams, on a single board. With team members assigned to cards, this makes it simple to see all utilization in a single location. This utilization board can sit at the top of a Dashboard collection, making it easy to drag and drop cards from the actual workflow boards to the aggregating board. The dashboard collection could be laid out like this:
In this example, if you choose to see utilization based on Kanban stage for both members of Team Alpha and Team Beta, the cards would exist on both the team boards and the Utilization Board by Stage:
Or you could choose to visualize by person and use Favro’s relations on the card to see the current Kanban stage:
With Favro’s new All Teams Expansion these utilization boards are even more powerful, allowing you to switch to different views of the same cards. Here’s what the Utilization Board by Stage could look like in sheets view:
In sheets view, you have the ability to sort by any column. For utilization, it makes sense to sort by Members.
The most useful view for utilization is likely the roadmap view, where the same cards can be manipulated and viewed on a timeline:
These same three toggles are available on every board. This enables you to also visualize utilization directly on the individual team boards.
We’ve looked at multiple ways to do manage traditional resource utilization, but to take a more agile approach, every flow-based (Kanban) system requires some slack in order to be fully optimized. Just as too many cars on a highway cause a traffic jam with nobody going anywhere, too much work in progress will bring your value delivery flow to a standstill. While you don’t want people to be entirely underutilized, it’s a better idea to optimize the flow of value instead of tracking and managing team member utilization. The analogy often used is in a relay race it’s better to watch the baton moving around the track instead of the runners. In a business, it’s more about how much value is being produced and not about managing people utilization.
Here are a few articles to start thinking more about the flow of business value and less about resource allocation and utilization.
If you have any further questions just send us a message and our Customer Success team will be happy to assists!