A sustainable pace of work to avoid overtime
Errors in management and misjudging the volume and complexity of work lead to missed deadlines and the need for overtime. These situations can be easily avoided by first selecting the optimal schedule for the team and using a sustainable pace of activity.
Kent Beck introduced the concept of sustainable pace as one of the methods of organising work. The idea is to perform activities at a pace a team can maintain indefinitely. If a team is working at a steady and comfortable pace, there is no need to pause during an individual task or to complete previous items at the start of a new sprint.
According to Beck, the presence of overtime indicates problems with project delivery. According to the rules of sustainable pace, in both Agile and Scrum, overtime cannot last long. Extra work for a week is allowed, but it should not happen all the time.
What’s the catch in overtime
Overtime is inefficient, as we can see from the following example. The development team had four weeks before the deadline, and the manager asked the specialists to work overtime to complete the project on time. The first week was a success. The pace of work increased by 22% compared to the average pace of tasks. The second week also saw overtime, but productivity grew by only 2%. In week three, the work rate dropped significantly by 16% and in week four by 20% compared to the rate without overtime. After the first week, people started to burn out, and the project never got off the ground on time.
This example shows that overtime can be beneficial, but only temporarily. Otherwise, productivity drops, and so does the quality of work.
Benefits of a sustainable pace of work
Working at a sustainable pace, adopted in extreme programming, has been successfully applied to large and small teams of specialists. Its key benefits are:
- A sustainable pace reduces team stress and improves the overall atmosphere.
- The process reduces the risk of error and the likelihood of defects in the project.
- It is possible to introduce overtime. However, it must be dosed and limited to one week.
- Better organisation of the work process in the team, reduction of breaks between tasks.
At the same time, working at a sustainable pace is quite flexible. There is no excessive pressure on team members: everyone understands their responsibilities and the importance of maintaining a certain pace of task completion. As a result, there is no excessive tension in the team, which can affect the general atmosphere and reduce productivity.
