How Bad Allocation of Time Investment is Slowing Software Delivery

A few years ago, growing your team meant hiring more people. Today, it’s about making the most of what you already have. Efficient resource allocation is now a critical factor in keeping software development projects moving fast and delivering results.

When time is invested poorly, engineering teams face project delays, rising costs, and slower progress. This challenge doesn’t just impact deadlines but threatens customer satisfaction and business outcomes as well.

After working with many organizations, we found that small inefficiencies typically snowball into serious blockers. That’s why we created a clear set of recommendations to help you keep your projects on track and your teams focused.

So, let’s start by understanding just how costly poor time investment can be.

The True Cost of Poor Time Allocation

Poor engineering time investment comes at a heavy cost for businesses today. A study by Rafay Systems found that 25% of U.S. organizations need three months or more to deploy an application after code completion, mainly because of cloud provisioning challenges.

Besides, top teams seem to be deploying 973 times more frequently than their underperforming counterparts, according to an older State of DevOps report from 2021.

The State of Salesforce DevOps 2025 by Gearset shows troubling data in the UK, as well as worldwide.

The study found that deployments are 26% more likely to be delayed than delivered early, costing organizations an average of £107,000 annually.

Delays extend deployment timelines by 3.8 months, even though most teams deploy only once every 29 days.

The 2024 DORA Report also highlights how time allocation shapes engineering performance at every level.

Elite teams keep momentum high: they ship updates daily, fix failures in under an hour, and avoid time traps caused by bottlenecks.

High and medium performers slow down, spending days or weeks just moving code to production. They’re losing precious time not just deploying, but also recovering from failures and managing rising defect rates.

Low performers face the steepest cost: months lost between deployments, high failure rates, and long recovery times. This pattern forces teams into reactive, inefficient cycles that drain engineering output.

Moreover, according to the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 30% of developers report that knowledge silos hinder their productivity ten or more times per week. Additionally, a Microsoft study found that software developers often face a gap between their ideal and actual work weeks, with time allocation frequently misaligned with their preferences.

This massive delay hurts more than just schedules.

It slows software delivery efficiency, drains team morale, and pushes critical opportunities out of reach. When software development teams waste time on low-impact tasks, it becomes harder to keep any project on track.

In a fast-moving market, delays like these create serious gaps between planning and execution and lead to lost revenue, missed customer needs, and competitive disadvantages.

Now that you know the impact, let’s break down where engineering time should ideally go.

The 4 Essential Categories of Engineering Time Investment

Effective development time management starts with knowing exactly where your engineering team's effort is going. Without a clear structure, it’s easy to waste precious time and create hidden project risks.

That’s why smart business leaders rely on a simple but powerful model to understand how teams spend their time. Here are the four key categories of engineering time investment you should track closely:

1. New Value Creation (Ideal: 50-60%)

This category is where real growth happens. It includes activities like building new features, expanding capabilities, and launching entirely new products. Investing most of your team's effort here helps keep your software projects innovative and competitive.

The focus is on delivering customer-facing improvements that directly impact business goals. Teams that consistently prioritize value creation are better at hitting project timelines and staying ahead in the market.

2. Enhancement and Improvement (Ideal: 15-20%)

Enhancement efforts make existing features better. This includes refining user experiences, improving system performance, and polishing any rough edges in your applications. Small upgrades typically have a major effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Enhancements ensure your products stay competitive without needing complete rebuilds. Properly balancing enhancement work strengthens team productivity and reduces future risks tied to tech debt.

3. Developer Experience & Productivity (Ideal: 10–15%)

Behind every great product is a happy and productive development team. This category covers internal improvements like better tooling, automation, documentation, and knowledge sharing.

According to McKinsey, companies that improved their onboarding through better documentation and mentorship saw a 20% rise in developer experience scores and cut product launch times by 30–40%.

Prioritizing developer experience creates a healthier work environment and leads to faster delivery of high-quality software.

4. Keeping the Lights On (KTLO) (Ideal: 10-15%)

KTLO work is necessary to maintain systems, but can quickly consume too much time if left unchecked. It includes bug fixes, regular maintenance, and security updates.

While essential, too much KTLO drains time from strategic initiatives. A report by Stripe found that developers spend 33% of their time dealing with technical debt, including bug fixes and maintenance, costing businesses around $85 billion each year.

Keeping KTLO within its ideal range is crucial for sustaining long-term project momentum without drowning in support tasks.

Knowing the ideal split is great, but how do you spot when things start to go wrong?

Step-by-Step Plan to Identify Time Allocation Issues

Spotting bad time allocation early is key to keeping your software team productive and focused. If you’re not careful, small inefficiencies will quietly grow into serious roadblocks that throw off your project schedule and stall delivery.

Why Early Detection Matters

You can start by inspecting how your team spends its time. Look for major swings in effort. For example, a sudden spike in bug fixes could signal a big-batch release or a sprint focused only on firefighting. If you notice your team constantly working on new features but never addressing technical debt, you might be heading for a massive refactor later.

Axify makes this much easier. Its real-time visibility into work allocation shows you exactly how much time is spent on new value, enhancements, technical debt, and bug fixes. In one dashboard, you can track actual time spent and see when your focus is drifting from project goals.

What to Monitor

Specific metrics you should monitor include cycle time breakdowns, work in progress (WIP) trends, and time investment summaries, all available through Axify’s dashboards. For smaller teams, warning signs include high context switching and long pull request review times, while larger teams often struggle with misaligned priorities and inconsistent work distribution.

You should also look for qualitative indicators like declining team morale, increased complaints about unclear priorities, and breakdowns in communication patterns across sprints, which often signal deeper allocation problems.

Axify’s Time Investment Summary helps you maintain a healthy balance by giving you a clear picture across all types of work​​.

Common Signs of Poor Time Allocation

Here are some specific warning signs to watch for:

• More than 50% of your team’s time is spent on maintenance or bugs.
• Major fluctuations in time investment from sprint to sprint.
• Missing links between pull requests and related issues or epics.
• Constant delays in code reviews and a growing backlog of open tasks.

Team size matters as well. Smaller teams typically face overload faster if time isn’t carefully managed. Larger teams may fall into traps of communication gaps and duplicate efforts if the allocation process isn’t clear.

Quick Self-Assessment: Is Your Team at Risk?

• Do you know how much time your team spends on bugs versus new development?
• Are your pull requests consistently linked to issues and epics?
• Has your technical debt been increasing without a plan to reduce it?
• Do you experience frequent last-minute rushes to meet the project deadline?
• Are cycle times getting longer without clear causes?
• Does your team feel overwhelmed by "invisible work" not tied to priorities?

If you answered "yes" to more than two of these, it’s time to take a proactive approach. Start by setting clear benchmarks. Ideally, great teams spend less than 10% of their time on KTLO activities. When you exceed that, it’s a sign to reassess your priorities and processes.

Tools like Axify give you the valuable insight you need to fix these issues early. Axify can help you align your efforts with real business outcomes and keep your projects moving forward.

Once you know what to look for, it’s time to start measuring it properly.

How to Measure and Track Time Investment

The first step to improving time allocation is to measure where your team's effort is really going. You can’t fix what you can’t see. That’s why setting up clear tracking early makes a big difference in project performance and faster project delivery.

Set Up Your DORA Metrics

Start by tracking your DORA metrics:

• Deployment Frequency
• Lead Time for Changes
• Change Failure Rate
• Failed Deployment Recovery Time

Axify integrates with your existing tech stack to pull accurate data without disrupting your flow. With Axify, you get automatic insights into how your team moves work from start to finish​​.

We’ll show you the deeper connection between time allocation and DORA metrics in a second. For now, let’s also see how to:

Use Axify’s Time Investment Features

Axify’s Time Investment Summary gives you a full breakdown of where time is going across tasks like new development, bug fixes, and maintenance. Its Flow Efficiency feature shows how reliably you’re completing work sprint over sprint.

Tracking cycle time lets you see exactly how long tasks take from start to finish. This highlights blockers before they become bigger potential risks.

Tips for Better Work Categorization

To prevent shadow work and false data, use strong tagging practices. Every pull request should be linked to a task, and every task should roll up into a larger epic when possible. This level of detail not only improves measurement accuracy but also strengthens resource allocation and helps you meet your project requirements faster.

With data in hand, you can now fine-tune your strategies based on your team’s setup.

Optimization Strategies for Different Team Types

No matter your team’s size, improving time allocation starts with proper planning and strong visibility. Here’s how you can optimize smarter:

• Small teams: Focus on clarity and fast feedback loops. Use Axify’s key metrics to track small changes and keep your project progress moving. Avoid hidden work by tightly linking pull requests to tracked issues.
• Growing mid-sized teams: As you scale, complexity grows. Use Axify to segment investment into new value, improvements, and KTLO work. Prioritize early automation and better code review habits to ensure steady delivery of quality code. Maintain clean connections between tasks and epics.
• Large established teams: With larger teams, transparency is everything. Leverage Axify’s dashboards to get a clear view of work across departments. Monitor project health by benchmarking each group’s efficiency against industry standards and your historical performance to catch issues early.

To see how this works in practice, let’s look at a real-world success story.

Case Study: Real-World Results

If you need proof that better time allocation drives real change, just look at the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). With Axify, their teams boosted delivery speed by up to 2X, which helped them free up resources for projects that mattered most.

They also increased their development capacity by 24% to achieve more flexibility even with limited resources. On top of that, they achieved $700,000 in recurring annual savings, which gave them more room to innovate without adding headcount.

By tracking key metrics and taking a more structured approach to work visibility, BDC’s software developers were able to improve performance without burning out. If you want to deliver better results with the team you already have, their story shows it’s absolutely possible.

Seeing results is important, but understanding how DORA metrics tie into this is even better.

How DORA Metrics Connect to Time Allocation

Tracking DORA metrics gives you a clear view of how time investment decisions impact real outcomes. With Axify, you can easily compare teams using DORA metrics.

When you invest too much time in fixing bugs or reworking code, your Lead Time for Changes will stretch longer.

If your team spends too little time on technical improvements, you’ll see a spike in your Change Failure Rate, which slows down delivery and affects project status.

When engineers spend more time building net-new features, the team tends to ship more often.

More code = more commits = more deploys.

So, higher time spent on value creation usually correlates with higher deployment frequency.

Also, KTLO covers tasks like incident response, hotfixes, infrastructure work, meaning the stuff that keeps systems running.

Time spent here builds operational readiness and response muscle, so when outages hit, the team can recover faster.

Axify helps you spot these patterns early, so you can reallocate efforts and release your software on time.

Here’s a quick view of how time categories impact DORA metrics:

Keeping your focus balanced across these areas allows you to not only improve your key performance indicators but also help your software developers deliver better results, faster.

Real-World Examples: How Time Rebalancing Improves DORA Metrics

Here’s how adjusting time investment across key categories led to measurable improvements in DORA metrics:

Reducing KTLO Time Improved Lead Time for Changes

A team spending 35% of their time on maintenance had a Lead Time for Changes of 14 days. After cutting KTLO's work to 12% and investing more in new value, their lead time dropped to just 6 days within three months.

Improving Developer Experience Lowered Change Failure Rate

A team investing only 5% in Developer Experience had a Change Failure Rate of 30%. After improving internal tooling and documentation (raising investment to 12%), their failure rate dropped sharply to 12% over two quarters.

Prioritizing New Value Increased Deployment Frequency

A team allocating just 40% to New Value Creation deployed only once every 10 days. By shifting focus toward customer-impacting features, they raised deployment frequency to once every 3 days, nearly tripling their speed.

Now that you see the connection, here’s a clear plan you can put into action.

Implementation Playbook: From Chaos to Clarity

Getting your team’s time investment under control starts with a simple plan. Here's what you need to do:

1. Measure: Capture Where Your Time Is Really Going

Start by setting up Axify’s Time Investment Summary and DORA metrics dashboards. These tools automatically track work across all phases of development without needing extra manual effort.

Companies that have adopted automated time tracking systems report recapturing up to $666,400 annually by eliminating lost productivity. Accurately measuring your current time allocation allows you to spot waste and hidden costs early before they become bigger problems.

2. Categorize: Implement a Clear Work Tagging System

Next, create a tagging system for your tasks. Make sure every pull request is linked to a tracked issue and that every issue is grouped into an epic when possible.

Axify makes it easy to keep your tags clean and consistent by helping you see how much time is going into new value, maintenance, bug fixes, and other activities. This step creates clarity across your software developers and improves resource allocation.

3. Analyze: Establish Baseline Metrics and Identify Imbalances

Use Axify’s flow efficiency, WIP, DORA, and cycle time tools to analyze your baseline performance. Look for patterns like long review times, too many bugs, or work bouncing between stages.

Establish clear key metrics for speed, quality, and stability so you can track changes over time. You can't improve what you don't measure, and the baseline shows where you stand before you make adjustments.

4. Adjust: Realign Work and Fix Resource Drift

After spotting imbalances, it’s time to act. Shift your priorities to make sure more time goes into new value creation and enhancement work, not just keeping the lights on.

Keep in mind that about 45% of features developed in software projects are never actually used, which means many teams waste significant time and resources. With Axify’s insights, you can focus your team’s efforts on what customers truly value.

5. Monitor: Optimize Continuously for Lasting Success

Finally, set up a habit of weekly or bi-weekly reviews using Axify’s real-time dashboards. Look at project status, work distribution, and DORA metric trends regularly.

Did you know that projects that consistently engage stakeholders throughout the development cycle see a 75% success rate compared to projects that do not? Monitoring isn’t just about reporting but about adjusting quickly and making sure your team stays focused and productive over time.

Hidden Time Traps That Slow Delivery

Even with good processes, a few bad habits can slow your progress. Watch out for these common traps:

• Pull requests stuck too long: When reviews drag, delivery slows. Axify highlights aging pull requests so you can act quickly.
• Working items are too big: Oversized tasks cause bottlenecks. Use Axify’s cycle time tracking to spot and split them earlier.
• Slow quality control: Lack of automation stretches delivery timelines. Axify’s VSM tool surfaces trends to help you pinpoint where to automate.
• Too many items in progress: Juggling too much at once kills focus. Axify’s WIP (Work in Progress) metrics give you real-time insights so you can limit and prioritize work.

Staying on top of these pitfalls with Axify helps you speed up delivery, improve quality, and keep your team working smarter.

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Wrapping Up

When you manage your team's time investment the right way, you deliver faster, build higher-quality products, and keep your team energized. Better allocation means fewer blockers, smarter workflows, and more wins for your business.

Axify gives you the real-time insights and tools you need to make it happen. If you're ready to turn your software delivery into a true advantage, book a demo with Axify today and see the difference for yourself.

FAQ

What does time allocation mean?

Time allocation means how you divide your team's efforts across different types of work, like new features, bug fixes, and internal improvements. Managing it properly is key to keeping software delivery efficient and focused on business goals.

How should I allocate my time?

You should aim to invest 50-60% of your time into creating new value, 15-20% into enhancements, 10-15% into improving developer experience, and no more than 10-15% on maintenance. Using real-time tools like Axify helps you track and adjust your time investments easily.

What is proper allocation of time?

Proper time allocation means balancing your work across value creation, improvements, internal productivity, and maintenance without overloading any one category. It helps teams deliver faster, stay productive, and avoid major slowdowns later on.

What slows down software development?

Bad allocation of time investment slows down software development by forcing teams to spend too much time fixing bugs or handling technical debt. Without a clear focus, projects take longer, cycle times rise, and overall delivery speed drops.

What is an example of bad time management?

An example of bad time management is spending 40% or more of your team's effort on fixing bugs and urgent issues instead of building new features. This typically leads to slower releases, technical debt buildup, and missed deadlines.

What does it mean to have bad time management?

Bad time management means your team is spending too much effort on low-impact work instead of high-priority goals. It usually results in missed project deadlines, decreased morale, and wasted resources on tasks that don’t move the business forward.