Why is my data team always busy but nothing improves?
Because most of their capacity is going to invisible unplanned work, incidents, ad-hoc requests, support, that never appears in the sprint plan. CDSI measures the gap between what leadership sees and where the hours actually go.
This is the most common complaint I hear from CEOs: the team is never idle, always firefighting, always responding, and yet the problems from last quarter are the same problems this quarter.
The answer is almost always the same. They are busy. But they are not busy on the right things.
The visibility gap
In most data teams, only planned work is visible to leadership. The sprint plan, the roadmap, the quarterly priorities, those are what get reported up.
What doesn't get reported: incidents, ad-hoc requests from business units, time spent on support, hours blocked waiting on dependencies. That invisible work often consumes 40-60% of the team's actual capacity. The sprint plan looks healthy. The team is stretched thin. Leadership has no view of the gap.
What CDSI measures
CDSI (Capacity Drain & Shift Index) measures the proportion of planned capacity that was reallocated to unplanned work, and where it went. It categorises every hour into one of five buckets: Planned, Incident, Support, Ad-hoc, Blocked.
When CDSI is above 8, the team is in crisis management mode. When it's above 9.5, something will break within weeks. Most teams I assess sit between 6.5 and 8.5. Leadership usually estimates 4.
The pattern
The typical breakdown in a team that "looks busy but produces nothing":
- 40-50% Support and Ad-hoc (invisible to leadership)
- 20-30% Incident (firefighting)
- 20-30% Planned (what leadership thinks is happening)
- 5-10% Blocked
The team isn't underperforming. They're running a support desk that was never budgeted for, never acknowledged, and never scoped.
What to do
Step 1. Measure CDSI for one sprint. Ask the team to tag every hour into the five categories. This alone shifts the conversation from "why is the team slow?" to "where is the capacity actually going?"
Step 2. Identify the top three sources of Support and Ad-hoc. In most cases, 80% of unplanned work comes from 2-3 products or 2-3 business stakeholders.
Step 3. Make the hidden work visible to leadership. The CDSI number belongs in every portfolio review, not just sprint velocity.
Related reading
Next Step
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