Tag

capacity planning

Chris Koens
In Contingent Workforce, Hiring Strategy, Strategy & Business, The Back Burner

Does Their Cup Runneth Over?

a photograph of an office break room with a nearly empty coffee pot on the counter. The break room looks shabby and unattractive, highlighting that the team is at capacity.

I’m betting there is a pot of coffee in your break room right now.

Maybe it is fresh. Maybe it has been sitting on the burner since before the morning standup and some well-intentioned co-worker keeps meaning to make a new pot but the day keeps happening. Either way, it’s there. It’s always there. Because that is what coffee does – it’s reliable. It fuels the team; it absorbs whatever the morning throws at it – but it also gets burned sometimes and overflows other times. Frequently, it just ends up empty.

Your core team is that coffee. Not because they grind – although I’m sure they do – but because they’re there. They’re showing up day after day.

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FlexTal
In Hiring Strategy, Leadership, Strategy & Business

The Invisible Ceiling: What to Do When Your Core Team Has Nothing Left to Give

A woman walks with a strange lean through an office space that seems to have an invisible ceiling - illustrating the concept of a core team capacity being reached by hitting an invisible ceiling.

There’s a particular kind of organizational dysfunction that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up in a boardroom slidedeck or trigger a crisis meeting. It moves quietly – through the organization, through the people, through the work – until one day you look around and realize that your best people are exhausted, your timelines have gotten optimistic in a way that no longer means anything, and the quality of output has drifted just enough that you’ve started wincing at things you used to feel proud of.

This is what hitting core team capacity actually looks like. It’s an invisible ceiling – an unseen, but all too real cap on capacity. Not a dramatic meltdown. A slow, grinding erosion.

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