Teams need slack. If your plan relies on every contributor working at full capacity all of the time, your plan is extremely fragile.
People take vacations.
People get sick.
People burn out.
People leave.
If one of your contributors leaves, and all of your resources are previously committed, how do you recover from the loss?
You won’t have resources to hire, to train, to pick up the slack, without pulling other contributors off of their work streams.
If you have multiple projects staffed like this, you’ll also have to manage agency costs, knowledge sharing, and multiple technical debt dumping grounds.
Again, if all of your contributors are fully committed, how do you allocate for these?
I’ve learned this lesson over and over again, but never seem to be able to teach it. 😔
I remember reading somewhere a few years a comparison to CPU: you wouldn’t run all of your cores at full speed all of the time; why treat your people any differently?
