Today, I’d like to share a strategy for balancing maintenance work and new features in your software development team that will save you time, reduce stress, and improve your team’s performance!
Let’s be real… managing tech debt and developing new requests can be really challenging, especially when you’re trying to meet everyone’s demands.
And here’s the thing:
If you don’t have a system in place to allocate capacity for the type of work your team is handling, your features will get delayed, and the maintenance backlog will just keep growing.
So, after quite some time figuring this out (with plenty of mistakes along the way), I’d like to show you a system that will help you strike the perfect balance.
Buckle up and let’s dive right in.
3 Steps for Balancing Maintenance Work and New Features
There’s a straightforward three-step solution to keep your team on track and avoid interruptions.
The steps are:
- Track maintenance work and new features separately
- Allocate capacity for each type of work
- Visualize your work distribution
Let’s explore each of them in more detail.
Step #1: Track Maintenance Work and New Features Separately
The first step is to leverage your historical performance data and monitor the quantity of each type of task within your process.
Make it a practice to tag maintenance and feature tasks separately on your board as they surface. The easiest way to do that is to use the Work Item Type field (or create a new custom field) to track each type of work.
The goal here is to start measuring the amount of maintenance work and features in your process. This is where the Throughput Breakdown Chart comes into play.
Use Nave’s Throughput Breakdown Chart to see how many features and maintenance requests your team is handling. Try it out at no cost for 14 days (No CC required!) →
The Throughput Breakdown Chart is a great tool to use when it comes to emphasizing the volume of maintenance requests your team has to deal with.
In the example above, the chart displays all of your completed work items split by work item type, exposing the percentage that each type of work represents of the overall work you’ve delivered.
For this team, we see that roughly 70% of the team’s workload consists of high-impact issues which in their case represent flow debt.
Step #2 Allocate Capacity for Each Type of Work
Now that the analysis is done, let’s proceed to step #2 and assign capacity to each work item type in your workflow.
In order for this team to better manage their work, they used the information from the Throughput Breakdown Chart to allocate capacity as follows:
With a commitment to deliver 10 items in the next sprint, here’s how many tickets the team will handle per class simultaneously:
- Maintenance: 3 items
- New Features: 7 items
Now, what you’ve done is allocate capacity for both maintenance and new feature development, effectively distributing your team’s efforts.
In this second step, we’re intentionally reserving capacity for each type of work using our historical performance as a reference.
The most important part here is to let your team perform at an optimal level and avoid overburdening them with more work than they can handle at any given time.
Step #3 Visualize Your Work Distribution
So, how can your board design support this idea?
In step #3, we’ll implement swimlanes for this specific purpose.
By setting a limit on each swimlane, we can regulate the number of cards with a particular work item type allowed on the board simultaneously. This approach will enable you to manage the distribution of your team capacity across the different types of work.
Here’s what the Kanban board would look like:
Each work type has its dedicated swimlane with a predefined number of tickets available at any one time.
This strategy provides a decision-making framework to determine which work your team can or cannot undertake to be able to hit their targets consistently.
It also ensures that your team can handle flow debt maintaining a smoother workflow and efficient response to both maintenance and new feature demands.
Here’s your action item: If you haven’t already, go ahead and hook up Nave to your management platform (it’s free for the first 14 days!) →
With our analytics suite, you’ll have access to resources, ongoing support, and everything you need to help your teams nail their commitments and build better products faster.
That’s it for today, my friend. By following these steps, you’ll address your development team’s toughest challenges with balancing maintenance work and new features, preventing scope creep and prioritization dilemmas.
Thanks for checking in with me. I’m excited to see you again next Thursday, same time and place, for more action-packed managerial insights. Bye for now!
