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

by Dominica Degrandis

The following three questions became the new agenda: What work is blocked? Notice the emphasis is on the work and not the person. Thief Unknown Dependencies often chimed in here with blockages due to database architecture issues. What work is at risk of becoming blocked? Here’s where Thief Conflicting Priorities typically showed up. Is there work being done that isn’t on the board? This question would then evolve to include queries about work that might currently be invisible to the team or problems that might have occurred during production the previous night. These questions often revealed the dirty work of Thief Unplanned Work.

Lean Coffee allows people to discuss the topics they want in a fun, respectful, and efficient setting. Organize and flow Lean Coffee topics through a kanban once they have been voted on. Using a board to show the status of work allows stand-up time to be spent discussing problems and uncovering invisible work. Holding stand-ups at a regular cadence at the same location reduces uncertainty.

Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I’ll behave. —Eliyahu Goldratt

Correlating activity with business value is risky. High activity levels do not equate to high business value. High activity levels equate to hidden queues, which contribute to teams finishing projects late.

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.

Author of three bestselling books on visualizing information and TED talk speaker David McCandless identifies four elements he believes are necessary for a visualization to work: Information: The data must have integrity and must be accurate. Function: The goal must be useful and efficient. Visual form: The metaphor must have beauty and structure. Story: The concept must be interesting and relevant.

Best practices have their place, particularly when it comes to simple routine tasks, but it’s often a better idea to conduct your own experiments to discover what truly works for your situation and organization.

Gaining crystal clear understanding on why a company is in business in the first place can fundamentally transform the culture of an organization because leaders can go back to this to make priority decisions.

Scrum and kanban can work well together. They are more alike than they are different. Differences include release cadence, roles, and the type of constraints themselves. Scrum uses a time-box (usually two weeks) to limit demand, while kanban uses the WIP limit to constrain demand. Some teams use a hybrid of both and call it ScrumBan (originally designed as a way to transition from Scrum to kanban).

Kanban is a method for the continuous improvement of your own area of work. You don’t begin with a big change management project, but rather focus on a series of small change steps. You identify the most important business partners and together investigate the strengths and weaknesses in your current work processes. Based on visualization of these processes, you use a simple means to make things more efficient, improve lead times and create added value for your customers.