Project: Department wide capacity tracker
Company: Loblaw Digital - Digital Experience Team
Role: Senior Manager, Digital Production
Date: 2024-2025
Department-wide capacity tracker at a glance. Clear indications of team member capacity (hours) already accounted for and available bandwidth for future weeks.
Detailed breakdown of team member time/ project allocation with links to initiatives and JIRA tickets. Designed to give managers birds eye visibility to their team's existing commitments and time allocations.
Higher level breakdown of projects broken out by LOB. From a glance, a user can understand final hand off dates, execution date and project status/ stage.
What I did
As a Senior Leader on the Digital Experience team, I observed that many department leaders struggled to ensure their teams could keep pace with rapid business growth. To address this, I spearheaded the creation of our department's first capacity tracking tool, providing easily accessible resource data to aid in resourcing discussions and negotiations.
How I did it
Drawing on my Product Management background, I approached the large-scale endeavor of creating a department-wide capacity tracking tool by first gathering requirements from team leads, recognizing that a "one-size-fits-all" solution wouldn't work for diverse work streams.
Key requirements identified included:
Ease of use for team members.
Maximum automation for repetitive tasks.
Highly visual representation of data for clear storytelling.
Projection capabilities to quantify past time and allocate future time for planning.
Shifting responsibility for capacity tracking to individual contributors.
Based on these, I developed an MVP framework and a phased project plan:
Phase 1: Create a master data input table in CODA to centralize information across all teams, enabling trend analysis.
Phase 2: Pilot time tracking with small teams using a sprint format, allowing for frequent adjustments based on real-time feedback.
Phase 3: Implement a sustainable framework for regular check-ins and communication among team leads to foster collaboration and proactively address resourcing challenges.
Results
Our MVP for the capacity tracking tool was a significant success. Team members across all disciplines gained the ability to accurately represent their time and quickly communicate their upcoming capacity. Managers and team leads effectively utilized this data to secure additional resourcing support from the business.
Quarter-over-quarter, we observed a 45% reduction in instances of team member overallocation and a 75% improvement in happiness scores regarding their ability to quantify time constraints. Crucially, this tool fostered a mindset shift among our execution team members, moving them towards a more structured product/project management framework, enabling accurate time estimation and proactive discussion of resourcing needs.