2025 Resolutions: a staff hours reality check

A long-haul project's success often hinges on the gap between staffing expectations and the reality of a team’s working behaviors. Future discordance isn’t always easy to spot through the lens of today’s perfect plan. You can mitigate risk upfront by examining where estimate↔reality gaps commonly manifest and explore strategies for resolution.

Initially, schedules come together neatly.

There are 52 working weeks (less vacation) with five working days. Each working day, a software engineer has an expected 8 hours of work time. All totaling +/- 2000 hrs of available labor per person per year. Just slot the estimated work into the available time, it’s that easy!

Unfortunately, these timing assumptions are correct in principle, but not reality—they’re just wrong enough to give false confidence when staffing longer project work.

• Miscalculating by five days across a team of 10 means 400 hours off.
• For that same team of 10, meeting one hour a week loses 520 working hours in a year.
• Three weeks of PTO/OOO across the team equals 1200 hours.

In reality, context rules. As shown above, estimate quality, concurrent projects, temporary resource availability, even the specific months your project occurs in can cause large swings. Relying on convention without a clear-eyed examination of your company's staffing context is a recipe for project delay, work compression, and underwhelming delivery.

Below are some context specific things to help you right size your project staff.

Plan against actual days

Start by taking a look at your company calendar and cross off dates when coordinated work won't get done. Be cynically honest here. Beyond conventional holidays, does your company empty out between Christmas and New Years or around Thanksgiving? How about intersecting foreign holidays, like Chinese New Year or your vendors’ mandatory break time? What days are linchpin staff out on PTO? Any company events or dedicated celebrations?

Rather than expect those days to be filled partially, plan as if they don't exist. You'll be pleasantly surprised on Thanksgiving week when you expected one day of effort but got three!

Holidays destroy sprints

You've crossed holidays off your list but have you adjusted your sprints accordingly? We're not talking about a reduction in fairy-dust story points. Have you adjusted for the fact that your people will be sporadically available, distracted, and under-supported when others are on vacation? That you’ll have the same amount of meetings (and "ceremonies") in less time?

In your head, probably. On your sprint plan? Unlikely. Don’t beat yourself up too much—there’s a full spectrum of opinions about how to handle this problem, and none of them are great. The only wrong answer is to assume that engineers working during the holiday will maintain velocity. Your context and team will dictate the right answer.

Plan against actual working hours

Planning against perceived available working hours is the schedule killer, especially for engineering. In a typical working day/week, how many hours are available for heads-down, uninterrupted doing? A quick assessment with a simple formula will shock nobody:

Total time - (meeting time + transition time) = work time

It will be painful, but starting from a known, brutal reality like "we only have 15 ACTUAL working hours in a week after meetings and such" will help drive refreshingly honest schedules and (hopefully) a tectonic change in how your organization works.

Strictly-scheduled work time

Smaller organizations often find success in scheduling working hours. We have evidence this works in the enterprise as well, though it's far harder to enforce.

Ironically, when people know when they'll be left alone to work, they tend to show up more willingly and fully for non-work needs like meetings and events. The only thing worse than a day of meetings is a day of meetings full of people trying to get work done at the same time.

Consider giving away Fridays

Every company has that person that plans meetings at 3 PM on a Friday afternoon, eager to chew through their 30-slide deck. This meeting usually should’ve been an email (or ignored altogether).

We all work differently, but most team members can agree on Fridays being a great day to not meet, not track, and not artificially extend. Let engineers use Friday to get stuff done. Or, if they're caught-up/ahead, get a head-start on their recharging.

Bonus: you'll have a far-more engaged staff Mon-Thurs without your schedule slipping by 20%

Don't bank on overtime, weekends, or heroes

2020 killed the work/home boundary and made co-working at home off-hours a key aspect work related stress. Conversely, people are working more hours and getting more done. This should be a boon for your staffing plan, right?

Don't count on it. Like overtime and weekend work, we’ve witnessed at-will work have a negative effect on timeline and work quality in larger projects specifically because it can occur in an uncoordinated fashion and cause stutters in overall progress. Individual heroics work great for short-term project gains like overcoming an approaching deadline, but you can't depend upon them as a long-term strategy for consistent, quality delivery.

And remember, exceptions prove this rule. Beware the 60+ hour hero who consistently saves your project schedule. It's not good for you or them and eventually, they'll get hit by a lottery ticket and you'll be in worse shape.

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Staffing a larger project is equal parts art and science. Reach out to Next Mile if you're having trouble connecting the dots between staffing expectations and reality.