The problemA team's week fills up from the outside
Requests reach a team through every door: a programme manager messages an architect directly, a director asks in a meeting, an incident pulls someone in for a week. Each request is small. The manager sees them one at a time, if at all, and usually after they have been accepted.
Three things make it worse. Some people are not fully on the team: they work a four-day week, or split their time with another group, yet plans count them as whole. The work that keeps a team healthy, such as reviews, questions, interviews and learning, is never on any plan, so it is always what gives way. And nobody compares the plan with what happened, so the same gap repeats every cycle.
What changesFrom a portfolio view to a team view
| A portfolio view | This team view |
|---|---|
| Initiatives ask people directly | Requests land in a team inbox; the manager or the team decides who takes them |
| Slices go only to initiatives | Also to reviews, questions and support, standards, interviews and growth |
| Everyone has ten slices to give | Slices spent elsewhere are marked: part-time, shared with another team, seconded |
| Everything is negotiable | Some slices are protected: growth and focus can't be taken by a request |
| One snapshot per cycle | Planned and actual, compared at the end of each cycle, with a trend across cycles |
The proposalSix small additions
A team inbox
Requests for the team's time are recorded once, with who asked and how many slices. Assigning one turns it into an asked slice on a person's strip, which they then agree to. Declining one is a decision, not a silence. The manager becomes a visible shock absorber instead of an invisible one.
Kinds of work beyond initiatives
A team's real week includes design reviews, answering questions, maintaining standards, interviewing and learning. Giving them slices makes them plannable, and shows who carries them.
Elsewhere
Slices a person spends outside this team, with a reason: part-time: four-day week, shared with the security team, seconded to the migration. They count against the person's ten, are drawn hatched, and can't be claimed by the team. A part-time colleague with two slices elsewhere simply has eight to give, and the strip makes that visible without anyone having to explain it again.
Protected slices
Growth and focus slices carry a small white bar and cannot be taken by a request. 37signals argues that calm, uninterrupted time has to be defended deliberately; this is the mechanism.
Planned and actual
At the end of a cycle each person redraws their strip as it really went. The biggest gaps become the retrospective: we planned two slices of reviews and spent five.
Trends
One stretched cycle is normal. Three in a row is a pattern. Each person carries three small squares for the last three cycles: red for over, black for no slack, white for slack.
LimitsWhat it is not
It is not a timesheet and not a performance measure. People draw their own strips; the manager reviews them in conversation. It is meant to be visible inside the team, not published to the wider organisation. Data stays in this browser.