In her book Making Work Visible, Dominica DeGrandis explains how to optimize workflow for both yourself and your team. She explains the power of limiting work in progress to drive things to completion.
There are 5 Thieves of Time
- Too much Work in Progress (WIP)
- Unknown Dependencies
- Unplanned work
- Conflicting Priorities
- Neglected work
- There are 5 Thieves of Time
- The Antidote: Convert theft damage into Metrics & Expose them
Too much Work in Progress (WIP)
What is it?
- Work that has started but not yet finished
- Demand on the team exceeds the capacity of the team
- 100% resource utilisation
Reasons we have it:
- We are team players
- We fear humiliation
- We like new and shiny
- We don’t realize how big the request is until we start working on it
- We tend to please people
Why it matters?
It can lead to
- Delayed delivery of value
- Increased cost
- Decreased quality
- Conflicting priorities
- Context Switching
- Irritable colleagues and teams
Ideas around metrics
- Indicator to show the amount of WIP on each workflow state of the board.
- This could also be visually represented by colour coding the items on the board Red, Amber Green depending on how long they have been active in each column on the board.
- Age of PBI
- Cost of delay
Unknown Dependencies
What is it?
- Something you weren’t aware of that needs to happen before you can finish your work
- Types: internal, cross squad or 3rd party
- Expertise
- Architecture
- Activity
Why it matters?
- Delayed delivery of value
- Coordination needs and costs are high
- Expensive interruptions.
- Availability of key people (experts) is required adhoc, so other priorities and commitments may be impacted at a cost to the wider business
Ideas around metrics
- To come back to
Unplanned work
What is it?
- Interruptions that prevent you from finishing something or from stopping at a better breaking point
- Failure Demand – sometimes unplanned work is necessary and strategic however often unplanned work comes from a fire that stems from a failure such as
- unnecessary reworks because the requirements weren’t clear
- expedited work requests because the requirement wasn’t discovered in time to absorb within the existing system of work
Why it matters?
- It sets back planned (high-priority) work that is designed to create value
- Increases uncertainty in the system (variability)
- This makes the system less predictable
- Impact on morale
Ideas around metrics
Action: Make sure all of these interruptions and unplanned work are visible in the system – this transparency will allow inspection and adaption.
Conflicting Priorities
What is it?
- Projects and tasks that compete with each other
Why it matters?
- If everything is priority 1 nothing is
- Features are only valuable if customers can use them i.e. having multiple 90% completed features sitting ultimately incomplete is a waste
- Lack of focus on priorities leads to wasted time in meetings/gathering requirements and setting priorities
- Connected to too much WIP (which leads to longer cycle time)
- Delayed delivery of value
Ideas around metrics
How long is work sitting queued up?
Neglected work
What is it?
- Partially completed work is work that sits idle on the bench
- The most common areas of neglected work are aging software and legacy systems.
- When these systems are neglected – they decay making them unpredictable as the technical debt adds up
- Tech debt incurs interest
Reasons we have it:
- The things that matter most must not be sidetracked by the things that matter least
- Sunk cost fallacy – purge low-value jobs from the system regularly – if neglected work is sitting there but won’t drive value get rid of it
- Revenue-generated work vs revenue-protected work
Why it matters?
- Important work that sits waiting eventually becomes an emergency or causes distractions and interruptions
- It’s perishable – it ages and like rotten fruit it’s wasteful
Ideas around metrics
- Shine a light on how long work sits idle
- Look at the relation between old work and new work coming into the system
The Antidote: Convert theft damage into Metrics & Expose them
If we can trap these thieves and expose their behaviour, we can do something about their impact on our teams.
As a Community of Practice team, we have been exploring the premise of creating greater transparency around the work we do and the problems we sometimes face. We have started a page to ensure we collectively use the right labels to aid our metric ga And as a business, we have had sign-off to use a 3rd party Jira software integration called Screenful.
Over time we will enhance our understanding of these areas and help form a shared understanding of the definition of what we are trying to expose and how we might be able to track them. From here we will build out reports and dashboards that can automate and capture important metrics that we will be able to inspect regularly as part of our day-to-day, sprint by sprint and quarter-by-quarter cadences.
The aim here is that we will then be able to see patterns and connections that might usually be invisible or scattered across multiple boards. Too many of these are inevitably going to cause delays so we should track and monitor/ alert when we see an increase.
Getting a handle on these will lead to improved predictability and reduced risk.
As a scrum master team, we’d really like to encourage you all to join in our quest to expose time and efficiency thieves and bring forward your problem statements so that we can collectively get better at this together.
Please use the COP teams channel to raise ideas or bring to the surface thoughts you might have. We can then look to form experiments and dashboards to aid transparency or facilitate a collaborative session/ discussion around the theme and identify the next steps.
We look forward to working with you on this initiative.
Good metrics are useful. They help us to make decisions. They steer us in the right direction.
- Metrics allow us to measure how long something takes. And why it took that length of time.
- They deduce risk or uncertainty. Show the uncertainty.
- They enable a probabilistic approach. Being predictable is what counts. Being predictable saves time.
- They help set better expectations which in turn helps ensure our stakeholders and leadership teams are happy. It’s all about expectations.
- Lack of data leads to decisions being made from opinions.
- Measure progress instead of activities.