Value Calculator
What could your IT team finish with fewer interruptions and less rework?
The cost of operating friction is also the commitments that slip, the backlog that keeps growing, and the pressure to hire before the constraint is clear. Model two distinct improvements in paid team capacity, then decide whether either is worth investigating.
Your operating opportunity
See what two modest changes are worth.
Reduce time lost to reactive work. Get more finished from planned work. Set the numbers for your own team.
Choose a view
Recover: time lost to firefighting. Tune up: time lost to friction in planned work. Both: the two added together.
Your assumptions
One team, one starting point. The numbers are yours to change.
New Relic's 2024 survey found that engineering teams spent a median 30% of their time addressing disruptions. Teams reporting five or more observability best practices spent 21%. You don't need to close that whole difference.
New Relic Observability Forecast 2024, pp. 45-46.
New Relic's separate 2026 survey reports 37% of engineering time addressing disruptions.
New Relic Observability Forecast 2024, pp. 45-46.
The study measured disruption time. Include your other reactive work in your own estimate.
5 points = 2.0 hours per person per week (at 40 hours).
Difference from the 21% reference: 9 percentage points
Your setting is at or below the 21% reference.
Include time spent on avoidable handoffs, repeated coordination and rework within planned work, not incident response or waiting while doing other useful work.
3 points = 1.2 hours per person per week (at 40 hours).
Recover and Tune up combined
Added output per year, valued at your current labor cost
8 points of team time
Each point of team time is worth $20,000 a year.
Five points recovered from reactive work and three points from planned-work friction.
This counts only your IT team's time. The teams that depend on IT gain too, and they are not in this number.
How the improvement adds up
What would you do with the capacity?
of full-team work capacity per year, not project-calendar time saved.
Where might the time be going?
Select what looks familiar. A few recurring operating constraints can consume capacity in more than one place.
Reactive work keeps returning
If requests can jump the queue without a priority decision, then planned work repeatedly gets displaced by whichever issue is loudest.
Planned work takes too long to finish
If no one owns a decision, then the team repeatedly spends time chasing answers, revisiting options and restarting work.
Relevant prior operating result
What better operating control has produced
Find the improvements worth making. Then make them.
The IT Operations X-ray finds what is consuming capacity and holding back delivery, then shows which changes are worth making. Execution Leadership helps put those changes into operation when the team needs someone to lead the work.