While having holistic visibility is never a bad thing–especially when it comes to budgets and spending against engineering projects and initiatives–sometimes a 30,000 view can provide too much information. “But if I have more data, I have more context” you may be saying to yourself and you’re absolutely right.
However, sometimes you need to focus on the task(s) at hand and drill down into resourcing data for what matters most to you, your teams, and your business stakeholders.
The latest enhancement to LinearB Resource Allocation enables you to:
- Get a granular view of resourcing by slicing data into different project aspects such as Epics, Initiatives, Labels, Tags, Teams, and much more
- Quickly identify and better understand level of effort invested in a specific business domain or initiative
- Make informed decisions and recommendations to stakeholders about specific projects and how resourcing can be optimized to meet business needs
Ready to start filtering your resource allocation data? Click here!
Get a more granular view of resourcing
Resource Allocation provides a ton of value and helps you understand the current investment (in terms of people and actual currency) into projects. However, before the filtering enhancement, it included all of your project data in a single view.
While this wasn’t a bad thing, it did limit how you could look at this project investment data. The new filtering enhancement offers more granularity and flexibility so you can see exactly what you want, exactly how you want to see it. This is fantastic for people like Team Leads, Group Managers, Project Managers, or Engineering Managers to understand resource allocation for their part of the world.
Here are some examples of how to slice the data:
- Understand how your three biggest projects/initiatives are resourced over Q1
- See resourcing for Team A (and their associated boards and custom labels)
- Look at allocation by issue type for Group B (Team C and D and their boards/labels)
- Investigate the work Groups A and B (made up of several teams) did by priority/impact and see the cost in dollars
In addition to filtering, another recent Resource Allocation improvement is the ability to export the data as a CSV file. Now you can grab the filtered data you want and populate other tools–like your favorite BI tool–for further analysis of resourcing, business priorities, and ROI of engineering projects.
Quickly understand level of investment in a business need
The reality for most engineering organizations–congratulations if you’re the exception–is that budgets and headcount are finite resources. A core characteristic of elite engineering teams is their ability to do more with less.
But even the most efficient and business-aligned teams need to make tradeoffs–it’s simply the nature of engineering.
Previous to the enhancement, your Resource Allocation report included all boards and projects synced with LinearB–so understanding things on a per-initiative or project basis was a little challenging. The new filtering enhancement for Resource Allocation makes the task of deciding on project prioritization and resource reallocation much more manageable.
As an example, let’s assume that your board or C-suite wants to see current investment in a mission critical initiative–like adopting GenAI and measuring its impact on the business. The new capability makes it easy to group all work that falls into this category using associated epics projects, custom labels and tags so you can quickly produce a deep dive report on this initiative’s resourcing. In minutes, you’ll be able to show that the GenAI initiative has:
- X associated projects
- Y number of people
- Z associated Full Time Equivalent
- $ budget spent to date
Then you can zoom out and look into how that initiative investment is balanced against other priorities–so you always have an idea of what levers you can pull to optimize resourcing and investment strategy.
Make informed decisions and recommendations to stakeholders
The rest of the business depends on engineering to deliver value via features that drive revenue, retention, and satisfaction. But they also depend on engineering leaders to provide data-backed guidance on how to proceed on strategic initiatives.
Using this drill down capability in Resource Allocation–taken with historical resourcing data, project delivery and execution data, current Investment Profile, and Project Forecasting data (link)–you’ll be able to confidently:
- Predict if you’ll deliver as promised with the current resourcing
- Respond to additional requests from stakeholders around the business
- Request additional resources on an initiative to meet a deadline as promised
- Make recommendations on what initiatives to deprioritize, invest more in, or stay the course on
Want to simplify the process of building your executive presentation? Drop your data in this template!
Resource Allocation Filtering Next Steps
This extremely useful enhancement is now GA for LinearB Paid accounts.
LinearB Users: Click here to start filtering your reports and zero in on what you want to see!
For Non-LinearB Folks: Learn more about this feature in a demo!
We hope that you find this recent Resource Allocation reporting upgrade helpful as you work to drive operational excellence and a positive impact on the rest of the business.