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Nevada Biernat
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A good way to introduce slack into planning is to use it to cope with the inherent uncertainty of planning. A team that averages 20 stories per iteration won't complete exactly that number every iteration. Instead we'll see a range: say from 15 to 22. In this situation the team can plan at their lowest consistent number (15) and treat the additional time as slack.
People often fear that slack will lead to idleness, but there are many productive ways to use that slack time. The most obvious is to tackle additional stories as an uncommitted bonus. This doesn't affect the predictability of the lower commitment rate, but gets more done on an as-possible basis.
But doing more stories is often not the most productive thing to do. Most teams are slowed by factors in their working environment. There may be inefficiencies in the build process, cruft in the code base, or unfamiliarity with productivity tools (most people have all sorts of undiscovered gems in their IDEs). Spending the slack time on these can make a big difference by increasing productivity in future interactions. Indeed the most common productivity problem teams face is due to a congested schedule that allows these impediments to fester.
Slack improves a team's ability to respond to urgent requests. Often teams need to collaborate, such as extending an API for another team's feature. Without slack, such work needs to be scheduled into the plan, increasing delay, and the cycle time of other teams. Small tasks can be handled in slack, done quickly with little ceremony. Remember that high utilization increases latency.
While I've described slack here in terms of Timeboxed Iterations it is also important to Continuous Flow. The smell here is if a continuous flow team is always busy - that indicates not enough slack, which will make them slower to respond to requests and unable to look after their working environment.
While slack is both important and often undervalued, it's a seasoning not the main dish. A schedule that's all slack gives up visibility and longer-term planning. But to run without it is like skimping on your oil changes.
Slackness refers to vulgarity in West Indian culture, behavior and music. It also refers to a subgenre of dancehall music with straightforward sexual lyrics. Again, slackness refers to the absence of a binding constraint. In this case, common decency or politeness.
Maya is in a world where she must signal she has no Slack. Slack means insufficient dedication and loyalty. Slack cannot be trusted. Slack now means slack later, which means failure. Future failure means no opportunity.
You were broke in college so you always spent time to cook yourself low cost food. Now you have a job and you are short on time and (relatively) more abundant on money, you can afford to order seamless sometimes and create some slack time for yourself.
You were a broke as an intern so you got a place far from work that you could afford. Now you have a better job and you are short on time and (relatively) more abundant on money, you can afford to pay more for a shorter commute and create some slack time for yourself.
In a Malthusian society with variable resource availability there will still be slack in the times of relative abundance. I also have a hunch that more optimization will increase the volatility in resource availability since it creates more opportunities for positive as well as negative black swans.
Slack is a team messaging application used by all walks of life. From a project management term for float, slack is frequently used to describe how much time a project can absorb delays in milestones and tasks without consequence. Leeway. As their Twitter feed proclaims:
For thorough partial word and phrase searches use the asterisk after a fragment to pull up all words containing it such as slack* resulting in search items including slacker, slacking etc.
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