Analysing how a team spends its time
How do we know if we’re spending the right amount of time on the right things?
In modern knowledge work, meetings often are the work, and so having a method for analysing how a team spends it’s time is important for optimising meetings.
DORA identified how to make high-performing software development teams. If we could apply that kind of thinking to meetings, maybe we could answer questions about whether we are spending our time on the right things.
Here’s how…
Collect data
We need the numbers.
People
For the team we need to know:
- How many people are in the team?
- How many minutes does each person work per week?
That gives us the total time available for the whole team:
| Name | Hours worked per week |
|---|---|
| Anne | 1,800 |
| Bobbie | 1,800 |
| Carlos | 1,440 |
| Davin | 1,800 |
| Eduardo | 1,800 |
| Frederick | 360 |
| Gino | 1,440 |
| Hilary | 1,800 |
| TOTAL | 12,240 |
Meetings
For each meeting:
- How many minutes does a meeting last?
- How many people are in the meeting?
- And for our thematic analysis, what is the meeting about?
That gives us a table that looks like this:
| Meeting | Theme | Minutes | People | Total time | Percentage of total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly planning | Planning | 60 | 8 | 480 | 3.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Tuesday standup | Alignment | 15 | 8 | 120 | 0.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Expertise share | Learning | 60 | 7 | 420 | 4.3% |
| Wednesday standup | Alignment | 15 | 8 | 120 | 0.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Thursday standup | Alignment | 15 | 8 | 120 | 0.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Show and tell | Governance | 60 | 6 | 360 | 2.9% |
| Friday standup | Alignment | 15 | 7 | 105 | 0.9% |
| Risk management review | Risk | 30 | 5 | 150 | 1.2% |
| Progress update | Reporting | 30 | 2 | 60 | 0.5% |
| TOTAL | 7 | 1260 | 6735 | 55.0% |
Analyse
Then we can group the meetings into themes and get a table like this:
| Theme | Total time | Percentage of team time |
|---|---|---|
| Alignment | 465 | 3.8% |
| Focused work | 4800 | 39.2% |
| Governance | 360 | 2.9% |
| Learning | 420 | 3.4% |
| Planning | 480 | 3.9% |
| Reporting | 60 | 0.5% |
| Risk | 150 | 1.2% |
With our data analysed like this, now we can interrogate and interpret it.
Interrogate and interpret
How much time does the team spend on certain activities?
We can see that the team spends 3.9% of it’s time planning work for the week. Is that too little, too much or just enough? If we ask team members on a Thursday morning if they are still clear about what was agreed in the Monday morning, and they say that they are, then perhaps the team spends enough time planning.
Are we spending the right amount of time on the right things?
We can look at it the other way too. If we’re working on something pretty risky, is spending 1.2% of the teams total time on managing risks appropriate?
How much time is organised and how much is self-directed?
Meetings account for 55% of the teams time. This means the team has 5,505 hours a week of self-directed time. This comparison could be used as a proxy for trust and be analysed against the teams output to understand whether more self-directed time leads to more output.
Conclusion
Of course, knowing time spent doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of what happens in the meetings, but that’s a different problem to measure. Understanding how a team spends it’s time is important for improving meetings and the flow of work.