Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

by Dominica Degrandis

The amount of requests (the demand) and the amount of time people have to handle the requests (their capacity) is almost always unbalanced. This is why we need a pull system—in which people can focus on one thing long enough to finish it before starting something new—like kanban.

TOC is a way to identify the most important limiting factor (the constraint) that stands in the way of achieving a goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor.

Sometimes the obvious gets lost in the crunch of the corporate world. We intuitively knew we had too many projects in flight, but it was hard to see until we measured the actual time that it took to get work done, at which point it became obvious the work spent more time in wait states than in work states. We spent time waiting for approval. Waiting for others to finish their part so we could start (or finish) our part. Waiting for uninterrupted time to focus on finishing the work. Waiting for the right time of day/week/month. And while we waited, we started something new, because, you know, with resource utilization as a goal, you have to stay busy all the time.

In their fantastic book This Is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox, they define Lean as, “a strategy of flow efficiency with key principles of just-in-time and visual management.”

All it takes is a shift from haphazardly saying yes to everything to deliberately saying yes to only the most important thing at that time. And to do it visually.

The solution is to design and use a workflow system that does the following five things: Make work visible. Limit work-in-progress (WIP). Measure and manage the flow of work. Prioritize effectively (this one may be a challenge, but stay with me—I’ll show you how). Make adjustments based on learnings from feedback and metrics.

The five thieves of time that prevent you from getting work done include: Too Much Work-in-Progress (WIP)—Work that has started, but is not yet finished. Sometimes referred to as partially completed work. Unknown Dependencies—Something you weren’t aware of that needs to happen before you can finish. Unplanned Work—Interruptions that prevent you from finishing something or from stopping at a better breaking point. Conflicting Priorities—Projects and tasks that compete with each other. This is exacerbated when you are uncertain about what the most important thing is to do. Neglected Work—Partially completed work that sits idle on the bench.

There are five other main reasons people give when I ask them, “Why do you take on more work than you have the capacity to do?” We are team players—“I don’t want to be the person who lets the team down.” We fear humiliation—“I don’t want to be criticized or fired.” Yes is easier to say than no—especially to the boss. Refusing a manager’s request can be risky in some cultures. We like new and shiny—It’s much more fun than doing the grunt work it takes to finish something complicated and unglamorous. We don’t realize how big the request is until we start working on it—“Oh, no problem. I can get that done in just a couple of hours,” but the task takes much longer. We like to please people.—“I say yes to most requests in general because I want to be liked, admired, respected. “

On the flip side, we rarely realize the power we have over other people when we ask them to do something, especially if others worry about explicit or perceived positions of power.

Cycle time is the amount of elapsed time that a work item spends as work-in-progress. In addition, business value that could have been realized sooner gets delayed because of too much WIP. This is known as cost of delay. It’s a concept used to communicate value and urgency—a measure of the impact of time on the outcomes we want, such as customers buying our product this month instead of next month.

WIP is a leading indicator of cycle time. The more items that are worked on at the same time, the more doors open up that allow dependencies and interruptions to creep in. Trailing or lagging indicators are backward focused—they measure performance data already captured. Most metrics measured in technology and business, such as lead time (the elapsed time it takes to complete a request from the time it was first requested), cycle time, and throughput (the number of things completed over a period of time), are trailing indicators. That is, we don’t know how long certain things will take something until those things are completed.

There is a relationship between the amount of WIP and cycle time—it’s called Little’s Law, where the average cycle time for finishing tasks is calculated as the ratio between WIP and throughput. WIP is a primary factor in the equation. It’s obvious when you think about it—as soon as you get on a clogged freeway you know that your commute is going to take longer. For this reason, Thief Too Much WIP is the ringleader of all the other thieves.

The notion of flow in humans doesn’t happen when context switching is the norm. Flow is the concept of focused motivation. It’s charac-terized by complete absorption in what one does (energized focus). It’s an optimal state that results in high levels of productivity and satisfaction. To achieve flow is to be in the zone—that space where intrinsic motivation and creativity flourish. To achieve flow, a focused concentration on the task at hand is necessary. This doesn’t happen when distractions, whether in the form of email, food, coworkers, or social media, interrupt us. When we are responsible for multiple things, such as maintaining production and delivering new features, we shift what we’re doing based on perceived priorities. By the time we get back to working on whatever we were doing before the interruption, we have to start all over again. Flow requires a “do not disturb” ethos.

Time thieves love the area of deep thought because, as David Rock relates in his book Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, it can take up to twenty minutes to get back to that same thinking spot after an interruption.

Kanban is Japanese for signal card—a card that, very simply, signals your availability to do some work. When you pull a card from the backlog onto the in-progress area of your kanban board, you commit to being available to do the work that the card represents.

We have a tendency to say yes to any request, regardless of how busy we are. Too much WIP prevents us from completing work on time, causes quality to suffer, increases costs, and irritates staff. Work-in-progress and cycle time have a relationship. High WIP means that other items sit idle, waiting for attention longer. Context switching, which wastes time, is a major consequence of too much WIP. We must learn to say no to additional work when our schedules are full.

Troy uses basic boolean logic (where all values are either true or false) to show that there is only ever one possible combination of inputs that result in an on-time delivery. Every time you remove one dependency, half of the total possible delay combinations are removed. If delivery requires every piece being complete, every dependency you remove doubles your chances of delivering on time.

Unplanned and expedited work steals time away from work that’s creating value. The 2016 State of DevOps Report survey data show that high performers are able to spend 28% more time on planned work.1 Unplanned work is considered a measure of quality because the more unplanned work, the less time for creating value. “All hands on deck” incidents tend to reduce performance and increase variability.

Plan for unplanned work by reserving capacity for when it arrives.

If everything is priority one, then nothing is a priority one, and everything takes too long. As Ross Garber says, “Many things may be important, but only one can be the most important.”1 It could be that the greatest value for the business today would be for you to go help someone else finish something instead of starting something new.

Some people have difficulty killing projects that have started because of a desire to avoid losing whatever time and money have already been sunk into the project. The more people invest in a project, the harder it becomes to abandon it, even when a more rational decision based off of future value would be better. This is known as sunk cost fallacy.

Unfortunately, unlike the visual transparency of physical labor, knowledge work takes place in the cerebral cortex of the brain, where thoughts are the result of signals passing through neurons on their way to the nervous system. Tucked away out of sight of coworkers, teammates, and the boss, our ideas for how to solve problems and design systems remain invisible to the rest of the world. How fantastic would it be if we could physically display all the intense mental labor that goes into creative problem-solving or conceptualizing new ideas with the click of a mouse or stroke of a dry erase pen (“See, boss, I really am working!”)? While it may not be quite that easy, it is possible to achieve visibility of work in the technology sector by making those ideas, the state of the knowledge work, and the related problems visually accessible to ourselves and to those impacted.

It’s not just all about us. We must consider the whole system by using a Systems Thinking approach to optimize workflow across all teams in order to deliver business value. Optimizing in favor of one team can reduce the overall performance of the company. Organizational health includes discovering what our customers are unhappy about.

Work takes a long time to complete because it sits in queues waiting for stuff to happen. It’s not unusual for wait times to be more than 80% of the total time. Many organizations are blind to the queue problem. They tend to focus on resource efficiency instead of applying systems thinking to improve the efficiency of the whole system, end to end.

A date that the CFO selects to roll out a new CRM system so that half the Accounting team can be laid off is a suspect due date. A change to a UX enhancement? Almost certainly arbitrary. It probably does not matter that much if it ships on Tuesday or on Thursday or even next week on Monday. If expectations are set correctly, not everything needs a due date. Being predictable is what counts. Being predicable saves time.

Similarly, lack of visible data in IT makes us blind to problems because we don’t have anything to tell us how we are actually doing. When we can’t see the problems, it’s hard to analyze them, which in turn makes it difficult to know what direction to take. This is what good metrics do—they steer us in the right direction.

Flow time has a start time and an end time. That’s all. Flow time doesn’t stop the clock just because the weekend rolls around. It doesn’t do start and stop, start and stop, start and stop. What flow time does do is quantify the probability of completing x% of work in so many days.

Collecting historical flow times that show, for example, that 90% of a certain type of work gets delivered within ten days allows us to say that nine out of ten times, we deliver these kinds of requests within ten days. We know then that there is a 10% probability that some work will take longer. This is important because it helps us become more predictable with our customers.

Lead time and cycle time are types of flow time metrics. They both measure duration. Using pizza order and delivery as an example, the lead time clock starts ticking when the customer orders the pizza, while the cycle time clock doesn’t start ticking until the cook begins making the pizza. People who order pizza care about lead time. They want their pizza delivered quickly. Internal teams care about cycle time. They try to reduce the wait time in the delivery pipeline to be more efficient. Lean organizations optimize for speed and effectiveness.

The odds of being predictable decrease when WIP constantly in-creases and flow times elongate. Remember—WIP is a measure of how many different things are being juggled at the same time. Unlike most other metrics, WIP is a leading indicator. The more WIP there is in the pipeline, the longer things take to complete, period. We can look at Little’s Law to understand the math behind why WIP extends completion times. Recall that lead time equals WIP over throughput. Given WIP is the numerator of that fraction, we know that when WIP goes up, so does lead time. Algebra and theory aside, the proof is in measuring the day-to-day experience.

this is why categorizing types of work is important. When work is categorized, you can get fancy and obtain WIP reports for each work category, which in turn can improve your WIP allocations.

Attempting to load people and resources to 100% capacity utilization creates wait times. The higher utilization, the longer the wait, especially in fields with high variability, like IT.

As we move from 60–80% utilization, the queue doubles. As we move from 80–90% utilization, the queue doubles again. And again from 90–95%.3 Once we get past 80% utilization, the queue size begins to increase almost exponentially, slowing things down to a grinding halt as it pushes 100% capacity utilization.

We don’t let our servers get to 100% capacity utilization, so let’s not do that to ourselves.

Like a false promise, Gantt charts (jokingly called “can’t charts” by some) fool us into believing that timeline accuracy based off estimates is doable. Developed by Henry Gantt in the 1910s, a Gantt chart is a type of horizontal bar chart that illustrates the start and finish dates of all the tasks in a project. The problem is that Gantt charts don’t consider the wait and blocked times that occur due to high capacity utilization of workers.

Instead of giving due dates, reduce WIP, prioritize by CoD, and reduce batch size. Instead of organizing by projects, organize by product and decouple dependencies on architecture or single threaded skill sets that increase wait times and lengthen queues.

Don’t exclude times when people aren’t “supposed” to be working from metrics or the metrics will be skewed. Look for alternatives to ineffective accounting methods. Just because they are “the way things have always been done,” doesn’t mean they represent the only (or best) way to do them. Consider replacing Gantt charts with queues. Beware of individually named swimlanes. Simplify meeting tools whenever possible. Make kanban boards (and other presentation materials) visually appealing to engage viewers.

There’s always more demand than capacity. Be wary of falling back into the old habit of starting everything because of the pressure to say yes to everything. Remember, WIP limits are your friend and the key to getting the most important work done.