Every engineering leader has asked the same critical question at some point: Where is all our development time going?
Teams are constantly busy, yet projects slip, priorities collide, and workloads feel uneven. The issue isn’t effort—it’s visibility. In agile environments where priorities shift rapidly across projects and sprints, understanding how engineering time is actually allocated is more difficult than ever.
That’s why Oobeya is introducing the Resource Allocation module—a data-driven way to visualize how engineering capacity is distributed across teams and projects. By revealing where effort is really going, Oobeya empowers leaders to optimize workloads, balance priorities, and make confident decisions rooted in real data.
The Challenge: Why Engineering Resource Management Is So Complex
Managing engineering resources in an agile organization is nothing like managing traditional departments. Teams are fluid, projects overlap, and priorities evolve sprint by sprint.
Without clear visibility into how time is split across different types of work—feature development, bug fixing, refactoring, or technical debt—it’s easy to lose alignment between what teams are doing and what the business needs.
Common challenges that obscure true resource allocation include:
- Overloaded or Underutilized Teams: Some developers are stretched thin while others are waiting on dependencies.
- Disconnected Tools: Jira, Azure Boards, and Git repositories all track work differently, fragmenting data.
- Manual Reporting: Spreadsheets and ad hoc reports cannot keep pace with agile change, rendering insights immediately outdated.
- Hidden Imbalances: Too much time going into unplanned work or maintenance drains innovation capacity.
In short, leaders have activity data—but not genuine allocation insight. That’s the gap Oobeya’s Resource Allocation module was built to fill.
Introducing Oobeya’s Resource Allocation Module: The Clarity Leaders Need
The new Resource Allocation module gives engineering organizations a transparent view of where their teams’ time and effort are truly going—directly within Oobeya’s Software Engineering Intelligence platform.
The module automatically analyzes data from integrated agile tools (such as Jira or Azure Boards), calculating two key indicators for actionable planning:
- Resource Utilization %: How much of a team’s total capacity is being used.
- Project Allocation %: How a team’s or contributor’s effort is distributed across projects.
By combining these two perspectives, Oobeya provides a comprehensive snapshot of engineering focus and workload. You can instantly see which teams are optimally utilized, which are overloaded, and exactly where your resources are being invested.
How It Works: From Raw Data to Actionable Insight
Oobeya’s Resource Allocation module leverages existing AgileSpace data and contributor information to calculate utilization and allocation metrics in real time.
1. Resource Utilization %: Detecting Imbalance Early
This metric shows whether a team’s workload is balanced, stretched, or under capacity, allowing managers to intervene proactively:
| Utilization Range | Status | Risk/Action |
|---|---|---|
| <= 85% | Underutilized | Available capacity remains unused; opportunities for new work. |
| 85% - 110% | Optimal Utilization | Healthy workload distribution and sustainable pace. |
| 110% - 130% | Slightly Overloaded | Requires short-term adjustment to avoid strain. |
| > 130% | Overloaded | High risk of burnout, delays, or quality issues. |
By visualizing these values, Oobeya helps managers detect imbalance early—before it impacts delivery performance or developer experience.
2. Project Allocation %: Ensuring Alignment
This metric reflects how a contributor or team divides effort across multiple projects. If a developer spends 60% of their capacity on Project A and 40% on Project B, leaders can instantly see that split in Oobeya’s dashboard.
This clarity ensures that strategic priorities stay aligned and critical initiatives receive the focused effort they deserve.
3. Excluding Irrelevant Work Types for Precision
To maintain analytical accuracy, Oobeya is designed to exclude certain high-level work item types (like epics or initiatives) from the calculation, focusing only on actionable, measurable work units. This ensures precise, meaningful results that eliminate the guesswork around capacity planning.
Why It Matters: Visibility That Drives Better Decisions
In 2025, engineering organizations are expected to deliver faster, more predictably, and with better alignment than ever before. But this is impossible without understanding the true flow of time.
With Oobeya’s Resource Allocation insights, leaders can:
- Balance Workloads Intelligently: Prevent overloads that harm code quality and morale.
- Plan Capacity with Confidence: Base sprint and quarter planning on real historical utilization data.
- Detect Misalignment Early: Know when too much effort is going into non-strategic or unplanned work.
- Improve Developer Experience: Distribute work fairly and proactively avoid burnout across teams.
- Connect Effort to Outcomes: Link resource allocation with DORA and delivery performance metrics already tracked in Oobeya. (See: Key DevOps Metrics Beyond DORA)
This level of transparency fundamentally transforms how organizations plan, prioritize, and deliver value.
How Oobeya Stands Apart: From Work Items to Effort
While traditional agile tools show only static work items, Oobeya also shows effort.
By combining real-time allocation data with its broader Software Engineering Intelligence ecosystem, Oobeya delivers context other platforms cannot:
- Unified Visibility: See capacity and allocation across all agile projects and integrated systems.
- Integrated Engineering Metrics: Connect resource data with DORA, Developer Experience, and productivity indicators. (Reference: Developer Productivity Insight Platforms in 2025)
- Automatic Inefficiency Detection: When used with the Symptoms Module, Oobeya highlights exactly where over-allocation is causing rework, lead-time spikes, or burnout.
It’s the clarity engineering leaders have been missing—the ability to connect who is working on what with how it impacts performance.
Conclusion: From Guesswork to Clarity
In agile engineering, time is your most valuable resource. Without visibility, it’s impossible to know if that time is being spent wisely.
Oobeya’s Resource Allocation module gives leaders a clear, data-driven picture of engineering focus—helping them make smarter, fairer, and more effective decisions.
When you can see how your teams are truly allocated, you can plan confidently, support your developers, and deliver faster.
See how Oobeya helps engineering leaders visualize and optimize their teams’ focus. Book a demo today.
