Dominica Degrandis's Blog, page 2

Trading Granite for Quiet

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This year, we celebrated Christmas with an old family favorite – spaghetti with meatballs and spareribs – cooked in a large crock-pot that consumes 18 inches of countertop space. With 16 people for dinner, space is a premium. I covered the small second kitchen sink with a cutting board and placed the crock-pot on top of it. Counter space problem solved.

We use the small second kitchen sink less and less these days. Installed during a kitchen remodel years ago, when children crowded the kitchen, it was convenient to have one sink for meal prep and one sink for cleanup. The second sink had a water filter which provided clean drinking water and served the cook. The old sink collected dirty dishes and served the dish washers. As the years went on, the water filter on the second sink became cumbersome to maintain and I elected to replace it with a better quality under-counter water filter on the old sink.

Now that the crock-pot covers the second sink, I realize there is not only more countertop space, but a whole other cabinet below to store pots & pans – that is – if plumbing pipes were not in the way. This suggests a new countertop though.

There are umpteen options for kitchen counters: laminate, corian, lapitec, stainless steel, concrete, granite, recycled glass, recycled paper, butcher block, soapstone, quartz, marble, tile, travertine. What to do?

I called Robin – a friend who is also a talented interior designer. She asked what I was looking for. I said that I wanted to replace the laminate counter (yes – laminate, not granite) with a honed-like material like recycled paper or soapstone.

Robin arrived a few days later to assess the kitchen counter.

Robin: “What about the flooring?”

Me: “The flooring?”

Robin: “Yes. The flooring. Are you going to keep it? Good design, no matter what style, selects one area to focus your attention on and all other design elements become supportive to that one item.”

Then, as politely as possible, Robin said, “Your floor is pretty busy.”

A random pattern of bright red, green and blue primary colors, our checkered kitchen floor is about as busy as it gets. Happy, but busy.

Me: “Well – it’s vinyl. We installed it 18 years ago before I knew how toxic vinyl was. It’s cracked and hard to clean. I’m ready to replace it.”

Relieved, Robin gave me some flooring and countertop ideas to ponder.

On her way out, I gave her my book, Making Work Visible – Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow. She responded, “Well – I don’t know if I’ll understand much of it – I’m not technical, but thank you!”

I explained that while the book does have an IT bent to it, people outside of tech have found it helpful. The technology sector does not have a monopoly on overload. People in all industries are overwhelmed with conflicting priorities and unplanned work.

Several days later, Robin emailed me, “I like the idea of grey quartz countertops with your pretty cabinets and this should be the focal point of your kitchen. A place for your eyes to rest. So that is why I think it’s best if your floors are quiet.”

Thankful for Robin’s sound advice, I read on.

“I’m reading your book and find it interesting that a lot of what you write about are issues which strongly influence interior design. I’ve attended many industry seminars (both local and regional), and the consensus is that the bombardment from social media, cell phones, and constant email have swayed design trends more than you would realize. It is one reason why the mid-century revitalization has come around so strongly. And why there has been a strong turn toward making interiors quiet, spacious, even spare. The need to escape the constant “tapping on your shoulder, just one more thing”, environment of today has brought about interiors that attempt to give your mind space to wander and relax. People are ripping out their flashy granite countertops in favor of solid color countertops. They want to come home to a serene, tranquil space.”

This is the reality of our everyday world. Continuous demand from children, school, aging parents, cooking, cleaning, laundry, social media, hosting holiday parties – it all adds up. Does any working parent have a normal thyroid anymore? Or non-stressed adrenal glands? The litany of health issues from stress is real and compounded from Facebook depression, decision fatigue, and digital dementia. It makes sense then that finding ways to cope with overload has bled into the kitchen.

Quiet colors help reduce stress. Finishing existing work before starting new work also helps to reduce stress. Limiting the amount of work-in-progress enables smooth work. Creative work. Quality work. Like a clean calm kitchen, limiting work-in-progress helps people enjoy a fluid workflow.

The small second sink has not been used for over a week and the crock-pot still sits on the cutting board. It’s currently empty – but not for long. Tomorrow it will cook Lau Lau’s for our New Year’s Eve dinner. So, I’m trading the small kitchen sink for more counter space. One less sink to clean, less plumbing to maintain.

By cutting out the unnecessary, the mind gets a moment of calm – a quiet bit of time to simply breathe. And like purging unused items, limiting work-in-progress enables us to simply think – a must have for the new year.

 

 

 

Lean Agile Scotland – where elegant insight meets raw beauty

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Lean Agile Scotland pulled it off again this year with an extraordinary utility-filled program. Exceptional keynotes, engaging workshops, and insightful presentations provided three days of mind-blowing learning at the University of Edinburgh’s, John McIntyre Conference Centre. Lean Agile Scotland is remarkable in many ways. The absent speaker lounge combined with an open area and collection of comfy chairs and couches provides an excellent hallway track for speakers and attendees to stretch their thinking and gain new insights. Reflecting on the conference while traveling back to the US, five sessions, in particular, stood out for me.

Luke Hohmann keynote: “Awesome Superproblems”

Luke walked us through San Jose’s community-based budgeting process. The community successfully brought neighbors together to prioritize the city budget. Gathered around tables, agile coaches facilitated sessions where citizens took part in making budgeting decisions using realistic-looking cash.

A similar simulation occurred at Luke’s son’s intermediate school where eighth graders had full control for deciding what to do with $500. Because students spend most of their day at school, they are in a good position to know what they need – in this case, a water bottle refilling station.

Luke then challenged the audience to put our professional skills to good use within our communities to make a meaningful difference in this world. In particular, to help people partake in making the decisions which impact them. I walked away thoroughly inspired to facilitate something similar for my local school system.

Chris Matts & Nick Poulten: Organizing the Portfolio as if you wanted to succeed

From the minute the workshop began to the very last-minute, everyone was interacting in a simulation exercise where attendees play roles and process work through an overburdened system. Executives prioritize work. Product Owner’s estimated time to complete work. Team members create ideas for the work that execs approve or disapprove.

Together, we discover the bottleneck in the marketing dept, the performance increase from reduced work-in-progress, and how and when to move people to the work versus move the work to the people. I walked away thoroughly inspired to rehab my workshops with more interactive and engaging exercises. Thank you very much, Chris Matts!

Simon Wardley: Playing chess with companies

This session opened with the history of Wardley maps which included the astute remark, “People aren’t daft. They can’t see their environment. They don’t have a map.” Tis true – it’s hard to win at chess (or in business) if one cannot see the landscape. Hence, we launched into a study of what makes a map a map, and how to create one – Wardley style.

Wardley maps are visual and context specific. They have a consistency of movement and a position of parts relative to an anchor (the anchor is the customer in the workshop example.) For details, check out the Wardley’s book-in-progress. Big takeaways for me included the doctrine list (used to identify easy competitors), the gameplay list (patterns for beating out competitors), along with the guidance to reduce self-harm before attempting gameplay strategies. Wardley maps provided me new insight into gaining situational awareness in order to make better decisions.

Troy Magennis: Forecasting using data – how big, how long and how much

Leave it to Troy Magennis to give away practical, hands-on instruction on probabilistic forecasting. Troy demo’d his forecasting tools to answer three common questions:

How big is this piece of work? (number of stories/work-items)
How long will it take to do? (duration),
How much? (out of everything desired, what will fit by date x)

In Troy’s words, “It’s about finding the right investment for what we need in order to hit a date and less about, just go faster.”

Numerous takeaways centered on helping people have the right conversations to understand things like:

What features are responsible to expect versus what expected features need cutting after erroneous expectations get set.
What order should work be started to get what we need by a given date?

In a world of uncertainty, Troy’s tools give people an alternative approach to faulty SWAG’s and estimation.

Cat Swetel: Why your agile can’t scale (and what to do about it)

Cat Swetel candidly takes on the problems of scaling agile. Specifically – the misalignment between Leadership and middle management and the lack of coherence between teams. One-way communication does not magically cascade down and out across the hierarchy because we don’t translate the “why” into the “what” very well. Somewhere in the stack, the message is lost between leadership and the teams and this is why agile doesn’t scale – people from different teams are unable to consistently repeat back leadership’s message.

Cat suggests playing Catchball – a method to clearly communicate and to enable good feedback loops of understanding. “If you want to scale agile,” Cat asserts, “you have to achieve horizontal coherence across the organization”. Hence the need for explicit prioritization and feedback policies to help ensure that we all work on the right thing at the right time. “Are we achieving horizontal coherence?” is the question to ask – continuously. I left Cat’s talk reminded of just how easy it is to miss-communicate across teams and the need for better conversations. Her actionable advice for improving alignment in organizations is well worth watching the 30-min video when it comes out.

Lean Agile Scotland fulfilled its promise – a remarkable experience of sessions that stretched my thinking and introduced me to amazing new ideas. In raw beautiful Edinburgh, bright minds come together.

 

 

 

The Art of Lean Performance

[image error]Starting a new Lean Kanban method is fairly simple. But once the basics are in play for a while, teams can hit a plateau. Taking Lean Kanban to a higher level is sometimes rocky. This presentation shows you how to level up your Lean Kanban implementation to a system focused on flow and continuous improvement.

This was the topic of my talk for DevOpsDays Austin 2017 that I unfortunately didn’t make it to, due to a head cold and stuffy right ear. Am posting the slides below for people to check out.

Please comment with your feedback.

For information on future speaking opportunities, or if you’d like me to speak at your organization or event, take a look at my Speaking page.

The Aging Report – A Harbinger of Late Work

Do you get surprised by work completed late? If you want to see late work candidates, this post is for you. What might a harbinger for late work look like? One measure used to see tardy work upfront is an aging report. An aging report (sometimes referred to as a staleness report) provides a forewarning of late work.

Work ages for the obvious reasons — special skills, holidays, the dentist. Work also ages from the approval of newer work and  committing to doing it before finishing work that is already in progress. Taking on new work before completing existing work-in-progress is one cause of work decay. Aging work is like rotten fruit. It’s expensive. It consumes space on the kitchen counter, and it smells bad – and it loses its nutritional value!

Stale work with zero activity (no progress, no updates, no comments), signals low importance, low value to the people making requests. Product Owners wait on results and wonder if they’ve been forgotten.

Much ado about Stale Work

When people grumble that things take too long, measure how old the work actually is. Query your workflow tracking tool to show everything which hasn’t been touched in x number of days. 30 days is a reasonable starting point. The resulting list might surprise you. I’ve seen lists with work untouched for more than 180 days. If that’s your situation, then change your query to start at 150 days. There resulting report should provoke a conversation amongst the team on how to get work moving again.

Sometimes a conversation on priorities is necessary. Often, the reason work sits idle is because people take on more work than they can handle, due to unclear priorities. Sometimes, unplanned work blocks current priorities. Whatever the reason, an aging report provides good visibility on work decay.

Back in the Day

The distribution of idle work items is a good start to an aging report. Here, we see the number of tickets sitting idle in the implementation work state. And wow – some of this work hasn’t been touched in over 240 days. Anything older than 150 days for this distribution is a reasonable place to begin ploughing through age decay.

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To get ploughing, I invited the creator of the oldest ticket still in progress along with the current assignee to a ten minute meeting directly following the team stand-up. Huddled around my desk, with a view of the electronic aging report, we pulled up details of the oldest ticket to see the current cycle time of the work and to discuss what it would take to complete the item.

Sometimes, it was simple. An oversight — items should have been closed weeks ago — meeting over. Other times, it was complicated. Often, some level of feedback or validation was required before the ticket could be considered done. It was frequently unclear if the original request had actually been met. The requestor regularly envisioned a different outcome. The done criteria was not clear.

One time, a loud argument occurred. The ticket resurfaced a disagreement in need of rehashing. Old tickets can surface old baggage — we are human. A facilitator (moi) helped to keep the discussion civil and on track.

In most cases, we closed out the ticket on the spot within 10 minutes. Sometimes, we created a new ticket for work that the assignee had considered out of scope of the original request.

Aging Reports Now Days

Last week, our Analytics team got together to prototype some new metrics visuals. We got lucky and Troy Magennis from Focused Objective joined us. One theme that ran across several visuals was to compare actual duration versus average duration. This is a valuable addition to the aging report above. It provides a leading indicator to work items  falling behind.

The rough drawing below shows actual duration as a long thin line and the average duration as a rectangular box. When the work item is taking longer than the average, the duration line turns hot pink to signal a problem.

Using Tableau (or other data visualization tool), it’s easy to filter and sort the data to show what’s important. This aging report filters out the backlog and work completed to show work-in-progress sorted by age. The result is a list of work items started, but not yet completed. Each row shows the title of oldest work item, its priority, the date last touched, its work state, and it’s current duration compared to the average duration of similar work items.

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This report shows work with no activity in 10 days. Whether your report reveals work 10 days old or 150 days old, the next steps are the same. Decide which item is the highest priority and focus on it until it’s completed. There can be many high priority items, but there can only be one highest priority thing. You can take this aging report to the next level by adding the average age of work-in-progress week over week (or month over month.)

View the aging report during stand-up to call out potential late work. Discuss further after stand-up with the right people present. Hopefully, stand-up ends 15 minutes before the hour, so people have 15 minutes after stand-up to discuss important stuff.

The aging report exposes work at risk of being late. It provides a useful heads-up tool to reduce the annoying situation where you don’t find out about late work until it’s too late to do anything other than damage control. Rather than rely on someone who knows the work will be late, but fails to mention it (there is always someone who knows), consider including an aging report in your tool bag.

Lean Agile Scotland: Getting Executive Buy-in for Architecture Changes

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If someone told me six months ago that my Lean Agile Scotland presentation would include Judy Hopps and Jack Fox stuffed animals, I would have fallen off my chair. Submitting talks to conferences six months in advance sometimes means the particulars of my presentation will deviate from the original abstract. My initial intent was to present LeanKit‘s journey to gain alignment across business and technology teams by looking at work prioritization, team metrics, and communication etiquette. But the talk evolved to how LeanKit’s Product Development team got executive buy-in to refactor a tightly coupled ball of muddy architecture. It’s a good example of hypothesis testing with actionable data.

Look for the video release soon. Until then please enjoy the slides below.

The Spotify Methods & Culture Recap

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Spotify hosted an amazing conference in New York, where 60 invitees from around the globe came together to discuss cools things their company is doing around Culture and Methods. Comprised of lightening talks, workshops and open-spaces, the Sept 23 conference exceeded all my expectations. Here’s how.

Spotify is comfortable with vulnerability. It’s okay to elevate problems — evident by Jason Yip’s opening talk, “How things Don’t Quite Work at Spotify…and How We’re Trying to Solve It.” Jason tackles the issue of physically separated teams and how, “it’s hard to have empathy when you are ‘protected’ from contact with others.”

Spotify brings in astute experts, confident in presenting alternative ideas – Yuval Yeret asks if teams lose their esprit de corps when scaling agile. He explores team pride in cross-functional structures with questions like “do we scale collective ownership across teams or have cross-functional specialized teams?”

Spotify provides incredible workshops with actionable takeaways. In less than 60 minutes, Steve Denning taught us the three essential steps for how to give a compelling persuasive talk.

Get attention – assume most people don’t want to attend your talk.
Inspire desire – give people a real reason to rethink change
Reinforce with reason – answer the how, what, and when questions.

Jeff Patton taught us Story Mapping basics, and addressed common problems for why story mapping doesn’t always go well:

Often, there are too many people in the room and they lack the necessary knowledge level. What’s needed is the right combination and number of participants. Those who understand the business, the user’s perspective, and the development aspects create the essential balanced team for proper story mapping.
A wandering goal level prohibits the correct focus on the intent — to “decompose the understanding of the business request from the perspective of a customer journey.”.Avoid too high or too low levels when it comes to story mapping.
People get hung up by the narrative flow of the story. The guidance here is to focus on the linear step by step activity and not on all of the possibilities.

Spotify provides space for attendees to build their own agenda to discuss things that matter most to them. Two open spaces I attended tackled these questions:

What is it about a company culture that enables them to great things? The answer? Generative Cultures (for details on Generative Culture, see the 2015 State of Devops Report)
 How do companies define “good enough”, when it comes to creative work? Four options surfaced:

Address the fear of never getting to go back and fix the embarrassing “good enough” deliverable.
Timebox the work – the show must go on.
The work is part of a larger picture – it’s not just about the creator of the work. “Designers don’t get to claim victory when the wire frames are done.” (h/t pawlsullivan)
SaaS is different from hardware – iterative changes are welcome.

Spotify brings agile, lean, and kanban leaders together to renew community, learning and purpose. They pull it off beautifully with a lovely venue, a fluid format, clear logistical communication, and — a fika. The event will live long in my memory as one of the best conferences ever.

 

 

Mapping for a Marketing Team Triple Win

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I worked with the Marketing team this week. They were struggling with how to publish content faster and more frequently. Everyone on the team acknowledged cycle time was too long and that downstream customers were unhappy about it. So – I helped the team map out their content publishing process to see where the problems lay.

Everyone involved with content wrote specific activities they did (one per post-it note) and brought it up to the whiteboard. We watched as eight people huddled around the board to organize the post-its in the order of content task completion. We then pulled up a sample data set of published content to get actual cycle times. The image above is the outcome of that exercise. This was quite an eye opener. For the first time, the marketing team could see the total elapsed time to publish content along with all the steps involved.

Making the work visible allowed the team to see the problems preventing value from flowing faster and frequently. The people with the necessary skill-sets were not available when needed and this hindered editing and SEO optimization tasks. When you’re really good at your craft, you get pulled in multiple directions due to conflicting priorities. Editors, designers and SEO experts were dealing with way too much work-in-process. On top of that, the lack of clarity on what constituted “good enough to publish” was nebulous. Creative work is subjective – one person’s perceived garbage is another person’s masterpiece.

We split up into three groups to discuss countermeasures to solve the problems. Group one set off to define “good enough”. Group two worked to redesign the Kanban board to accurately reflect how content work flowed, so it could be better measured with respect to touch time and wait time. And the third group came up with options for how to restructure the team to better align skill sets around the value streams Marketing is responsible for.

The groups agreed to give each other ownership of the outcomes and to support each other’s decisions. We time-boxed the exercise to 90 minutes to minimize the team’s historic culture of never-ending discussion that had prevented innovative change in the past. The next morning, each group returned to present their proposed countermeasures.

After much discussion, group one agreed to define “Good enough” in the form of four questions related to: accuracy, brand, function and the original goal. Group two presented a new and improved kanban board design to reflect the improved content workflow — they took the process from 16 steps down to eight! Group three proposed a restructure of the team, from one large group, to three groups organized by value stream (Awareness/Content, Lead Generation and Product).

What began as a relatively simple Lean Kanban workflow mapping exercise to gain visibility on bottlenecks resulted in an improved streamlined workflow. And even more amazing, the workshop resulted in two additional major wins — guidelines to help creative workers know (and be okay with) handing over “good enough” work, and a new team organizational structure  — designed to deliver value more frequently. A triple win for the marketing team.

 

One Page Please

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Ever find yourself in a situation where the why behind architectural design decisions are forgotten? “This was dumb – why did we do this?” And then the search begins – where, when, why, who contributed?

If you are lucky, it’s easy to find and read meeting outcomes — tl;dr begone. Imagine the ability to find decisions made – along with why/when/who, from six months ago. Bliss!

A concise one page meeting recap with essential nuggets at the top helps. Here’s the one page meeting recap template I use:

Meeting Title/Date:

Attendees:

Risks:

Decisions:

Actions:

Details: blah, blah, blah…

This format works because everything is visible at a single glance on one page. People can find important information quickly. Essential info at the top helps everyone see what matters most. Details at the bottom help those concerned with particulars understand the finer points. The nuggets of critical info – decisions, risks and actions, get discussed. Clarity ensues and people can get on the same page. It’s invaluable when everyone walks out of a meeting on the same page. Good meeting recaps help – if you can find them.

Real reason we open sourced everything: it’s easier to search the internet than it was to search our internal wiki

— Bryan Cantrill (@bcantrill) August 30, 2016

Unorganized wiki pages bury info. Emails get deleted. Slack and Cog are great for today’s conversations, but what about three months from now?  So — where is the sweet spot for storing important info? If you have a good strategy for stashing and finding decisions from past meetings, I’d like to hear more.