Too much demand? Here are some practical steps to avoid over-committing.

Too much demand? Here are some practical steps to avoid over-committing.

It’s great when an analytical team is in demand - it means the organisation is hungry for your services and is keen to leverage the skills and value you can bring to the decision making process.

However, all too often this increase in demand can lead to analysts over-committing themselves as they bow to the pressure stakeholders place on the team. Without an effective way of managing and planning incoming work, the situation can quickly escalate with teams over-promising and under-delivering - a situation which will not only lead to frustration for the stakeholders but also frustration and stress for the analysts. It can lead to the analysts feeling undervalued as they may attempt to soak up the demand through working harder, longer hours but in reality, if this persists in the longer term quality and timeliness will eventually be compromised and despite committing more time to work stakeholders may become disillusioned and trust may erode. Altogether it’s a lose/lose situation for both analysts and stakeholders.

In one of my previous roles I was asked to help manage a small team of BI analysts that were struggling to cope with workloads. The team had recently lost their manager and were drowning in requests from clients. They were hard working, had a great attitude and were very dedicated but clients were screaming for reports as deadlines were constantly being missed.?

Understandably, without a manager to actively manage their workloads they lacked the experience and skills to fulfil this role themselves. Now, I only had a couple of days a week available to this team as I was managing my own team in Manchester and they were based in London so I could only guide them and offer support, but I put in place a plan to attempt to reverse the situation.

This experience taught me some valuable lessons and so I’d like to share these with you in the form of some best practices when you feel over-committed.

1. Establish Your Team's True Capacity

Your contract may stipulate you work 35/40 hours a week - however, it’s unrealistic to assume you can utilise all these hours to undertake your technical work - in my experience? analytical teams only have anywhere between 40% and 80% of their time available to do technical work due to other demands (e.g. training, leave, general meetings etc.). So if we recognise it, we need to adjust our plans to this capacity. But how do we know what our capacity is? We should capture this as an on-going exercise..

Capture Your Current Workload:

  • Start by understanding how your team spends its time. Implement a simple time-tracking system to log activities. Use broad categories like client project work, ad hoc requests, meetings, training, and leave to keep it simple to complete. Have an ‘unassigned’ category to make sure the hours add up to the time spent working.
  • Example timesheet…

  • Encourage team members to record their time spent on each task to the nearest half-hour. Doing this should be a quick five-minute exercise at the end of each day to complete and not become a burdensome overhead on top of their daily workload.??

Analyse and Assess:

  • After a few weeks, analyse the data to identify patterns. Are you spending too much time on non-essential tasks? What percentage of time is truly available for technical work?
  • Use this analysis to gain a clear picture of exactly how much time your team is currently able to assign to undertaking technical work.?
  • Use this to ensure you don’t over commit to future work. For example, if over the last few months only 60% of the team’s time is spent on ‘doing the work’ then you should not be planning to accept more than 3 days work in a 5 day working week.

2. Engage with Stakeholders

When the demands outstrip capacity it’s important to work with stakeholders in order to navigate through the issues and ensure work is effectively planned and prioritised.

Pro-actively seek to engage with stakeholders.?

  • Ensure you are pro-active in discussing your stakeholders expectations directly with them and understanding their priorities especially if you know service has been compromised through over-committing. Talking to key stakeholders about their priorities and expectations to understand what truly matters to them helps you align your efforts with their expectations.
  • Give the stakeholder options? - discuss whether they would prefer fewer deliverables with guaranteed on-time delivery or more reports with extended deadlines.(In my experience they would generally prefer key deliverables on-time and be prepared to sacrifice those requests they deem lower priority).

Share your capacity analysis with your stakeholders:

  • Use the data from your time-tracking analysis to share your team’s capacity and limitations clearly. Presenting hard figures can lead to more productive conversations than simply having an emotional rant about how over-committed you are.
  • Sharing the analysis can help stakeholders and senior managers identify areas where the team’s non-technical commitments can be reduced so that overall capacity can increase.

3. Find Advocates for Your Team’s Needs

Having your capacity analysis laid out in black and white can be incredibly powerful. If senior management knows that their highly valued technical teams only spend 50% of their time on non-technical work then it will likely precipitate a conversation about what measures can be introduced to improve capacity.

Build Internal Support:

  • Share your analysis with internal teams to gain their support in managing workloads. Identify advocates who can help reduce non-core demands on your team (often, a good team leader should be able to do this).
  • Share the analysis with senior managers and budget holders. Use the analysis to put a proposal together to support the case for increasing headcount in the team. If unsuccessful, reiterate the need to reduce commitments to match capacities.
  • Clearly articulate the impact of current workload levels on the quality and timeliness of work? - often, these elements can have a significant impact on the team’s morale and productivity.?

Conclusion

When I was faced with my own challenges with the London team of analysts these are the key steps I took to address the issues. By sharing the capacity analysis I was able to gain advocates keen to get what they saw as key resources working more productively whilst having frank conversations with stakeholders about the need to prioritise demand and reset expectations worked really well to reduce demand on the team.?

The result was that, over a period of weeks, the team’s capacity increased as non-core practices were reduced through agreement with relevant parties and they became focused on fewer projects but were delivering these to the quality and timelines needed - consequently the stakeholders were happier and so were the team as they were not feeling so overwhelmed and were getting positive feedback from stakeholders (rather than being hounded for work being late). Ultimately the team were able to get their work/life balance back and overall morale improved significantly.

Managing workloads effectively is crucial for maintaining team productivity and morale. By capturing your team's true capacity, communicating transparently with stakeholders, focusing on high-impact work and advocating for your needs, you can create a more sustainable and rewarding work environment.

If you find your team struggling with workloads, take a moment to assess your capacity and open up discussions on how to realign efforts with available resources. By implementing these best practices, you can help your team deliver exceptional results while avoiding burnout.

Steve Hulmes - Analyst Coach, Sophic

Sophic runs development workshops for data analysts which are designed to help them build trust and credibility with stakeholders. Strategies that can support analysts get the work/life balance they need are discussed in the ‘Managing Workloads and Expectations’ workshop which will provide them with the behaviours, practices and techniques required to become the trusted consultants they aspire to be and your organisation needs them to be. You can find out further details here.

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