Why pipeline planning?
🟦 Weekly capacity planning for the entire team
This text provides background information. What types of text are there?
Existing customers often generate continuous sales for service companies in the form of small, acute inquiries. Customers report problems or requests for enhancements to their agent, who then creates actionable tickets. In ongoing projects, a large number of tasks often accumulate - far more than the developers can handle in a week. It is therefore inevitable that some tasks can only be processed in later weeks.
As the developers' capacities arelimited, the most important tickets must be prioritized. However, this prioritization is complex, as everyone involved has different priorities:
- Customers consider their own project to be the most important and also prioritize within their project.
- Account managers have to manage several projects and often prioritize according to customer turnover or the urgency of the tickets in order to avoid complaints.
- Team leaders want to generate as much turnover as possible with the developer capacities and avoid customers becoming dissatisfied.
The team leader's decision alone is not enough to reach a consensus. The assessments of the account managers, based on agreements with the respective customers, are crucial. Effective allocation of available capacities should therefore ideally be carried out within the team. In a weekly meeting, the administrators and the team leader coordinate and plan the developers' capacities together.
To make such routine meetings efficient, Leadtime ERP has integrated the pipeline view, which enables time-saving capacity planning for the particularly valuable working time of the company's specialists.
Structure of the pipeline view
The pipeline view shows the employees vertically and the week horizontally in a 15-minute grid. Tickets can be placed on this grid and their length can be adjusted to show the developer's expected working time. A meeting of the clerks is held to discuss which tickets should be scheduled in which order for which developer. The moderator carries out the planning in the pipeline view and the defined order is automatically transferred to the developer's stacks.
Note: Of course, the pipeline can also be carried out by a single authorized employee alone. However, if you really want to determine across all projects which tasks bring the most value for the upcoming week, a short planning meeting is the most efficient approach.
Optimal sequence of meetings
Ideally, the pipeline meeting should take place after the weekly pool planning of the individual specialists. This way, everyone involved is aware of the priorities for the week and can negotiate together which tickets actually make it into the developers' pipeline for implementation.
Practical example: Pipeline planning
On Monday at around 11 a.m., the "pipeline meeting" takes place at Archiolabs, the provider of cloud software for architecture firms. Mike, the team leader, has his laptop connected to a large monitor on which the pipeline view in Leadtime ERP can be seen. Planning starts on Monday and ends on Friday.
This week, developer capacity is particularly tight as Marie, a developer, is on vacation from Wednesday to Friday. Mike and the account managers Eva, Alex, Sandra, Hannes and Maike have already set their priorities before the meeting and bring lists with them containing the tickets they think should be scheduled for this week.
During the planning it turns out that Jan, the most experienced developer, is needed for some important and complex tickets. Sandra pushes for Jan to take on a particularly large ticket, but this would take up an entire working week. After a discussion, the team decides to split the ticket to better fit it into the time available.
The meeting ends after about 30 minutes and the developers find their planned tickets in the correct order in their stacks. If an urgent, unplanned issue arises during the week, Mike will adjust the pipelines accordingly.
Pipeline planning allows the team to make the best use of valuable developer capacity and efficiently organize priorities for the week.