Team Calendar

A managed approach with distributed information capturing.

We all know these situations, when high-priority tasks need to be completed and a key team member will be on vacation, completely unexpected. How can transparency regarding availability of capacities be improved, without increasing administrative overhead?

Relying on practices like centrally managed absence lists have proven to be non-sustainable and lack consistency to ensure completeness. Hence, making availabilities transparent and addressing them frequently is important to increase predictability in product teams. Subsequently, we will outline a managed approach with distributed information capturing.

Identified needs & tools

To successfully implement and maintain required structures and practices, it is important to identify and understand underlying needs.

Data management Managed approach to keep data up-to-date Ease of use and accessibility of data Decentralization of data maintenance	Visualization Combination of various data points Simple aggregation of data / overlay
Data points Vacations, absences and holidays Sprint overview / releases / testing Parallel projects / outstanding offers	Risk Reduction Recognize dependencies early Enable fact-based decision making

Based on these needs, tool support is key. Given the ease of use and widespread distribution of Microsoft Outlook, we gained good experiences using it to track availability transparently. Furthermore, it offers overlay options to integrate various team calendars as overlay to your own, personal calendar.

Managed approach & distributed responsibility

Each team member is responsible to capture his or her own calendar entries in the team calendar, in addition to the personal calendar. Hence, overhead is neglectable. Even though, team members are responsible for their own calendar entries, each team calendar is owned by the respective Scrum Master. The owner ensures, calendar entries are captured and reviewed periodically.

Graphic 1: Distributed data capturing, managed centrally

Every team defines a weekly review time slot, for example at the beginning of the weekly refinement ceremony. All absences for the upcoming weeks are reviewed and confirmed, while missing entries will be added. We refer to this as a managed approach.

Essentially, an individual team calendar per product team will increase transparency regarding availability of key personnel. Capacity planning will be improved and potential shortages can be identified early. Ultimately, predictability of work in product teams can be increased.

Spark Mind can help you increase the effectiveness of distributed, self-organized teams.

Download the PDF version of this article here:

White Paper - Team Calendar

.pdf

Download PDF • 558KB

_______________________________________________________