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

by Dominica Degrandis

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.

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.

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.

Let’s define dependency. From my perspective, when we talk about dependencies, three types emerge: Architecture (both software and hardware)—where change in one area can break another area (i.e., cause it to stop functioning)

Expertise—where counsel or aid from a person with specific know-how is needed to do something Activity—Where progress cannot be made until an activity is complete

Troy Magennis gave an enlightening talk on dependencies at the Agile 2015 Conference in Washington, D.C. 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.

You know Thief Neglected Work is stealing time from you when you delay important tasks that will eventually become emergencies. It’s like planning to take your better half out for your anniversary dinner, then deciding to skip going out this year in favor of batching it up with next year’s anniversary.

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst. —William Penn

When we create categories for our work, we can collect the data necessary to create the metrics for the different types of work that shows us (and leadership) the health of our system.

When deciding the number of categories, I’ve found that somewhere between three and seven is good. Any more than that and it becomes hard to manage, because for each category, you may have different rules, different metrics, and potentially different workflows.

WIP limits provoke necessary conversations.

“By the time you find out you suck, you have sucked for a very long time.

Knowing the ratio of unplanned work to planned work helps when planning your workload capacity.

You may be thinking that allocating your workload (your capacity) by WIP limits won’t fly because your work items aren’t all the same size. This is an area where size doesn’t really matter because you can only work on so many things at a time.

During the 1960s, the coffee cart at HP rolled around at 10:15 every morning. All the engineers drank coffee and casually discussed top-of-mind issues. It was a goldmine condition that generated spontaneous collaborative advances. A lot of problems got unstuck at the coffee cart. In the 1970s, cost-cutting decisions were made to replace the coffee cart with a self-service coffee pot on the counter in the mini kitchen. Engineers still took a break to get coffee but not at the same time. No more set coffee break, no more spontaneous brainstorming. Gone were the unplanned collaborative developments—all in the name of cost savings.

The goal with prioritization is to determine what to complete next in order to get maximum value in the shortest amount of time and to avoid multitasking due to competing priorities.

We are often confident even when we are wrong,1 and it can be hard for us to see when we are wrong. This is why making prioritization policies visible is vital—it drives the right conversations for delivering ideal outcomes.

Cost of Delay combines urgency and value—two things that humans are not very good at distinguishing between. To make decisions, we need to understand not just how valuable something is, but how urgent it is.

Never let something important become urgent. —Eliyahu

When too much work is in process, bad stuff happens: context switching increases, bottlenecks develop, dependencies rise, windows of opportunity close, and holidays arrive.

Revenue-protecting work is a major target of Thief Neglected Work. Because the business is often unaware of what’s involved in keeping a system secure, reliable, and functioning, revenue-generating work is considered a higher priority than intangible maintenance and sustainment work.

(It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.)

The odds of being predictable decrease when WIP constantly in-creases and flow times elongate.

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.

In knowledge work, however, problems with coordination costs grow nonlinearly with batch size.

Imagine you’re grocery shopping for bananas. If you buy a six-month supply of bananas at one time, your transaction cost is low, but most of the bananas will be rotten within ten days, so you’ve wasted money.