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April 6 - April 7, 2019
Knowing the ratio of unplanned work to planned work helps when planning your workload capacity. Why? Because you’ll have an idea of how to set WIP limits to accommodate important, unexpected, and urgent work. If every week there is 25–50% unplanned work, then allocate 25–50% of your WIP for potential unplanned work.
Each month, view your ratio of planned work to unplanned work to see if the trend is moving up or down, and adjust your WIP allocation accordingly.
Office hours: Just like with your teachers back in school, schedule a specific amount of time (a time-boxed amount of time) a couple of hours a week and let people know when they can get your time. Office hours give your colleagues a chance to drop in at your convenience.
Do not disturb hours:
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
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Because the A3 method helps you get understanding and agreement, it can be used to discuss prioritization methods. 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.
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.
The goal, then, is to understand what work should be completed next in order to achieve the best possible outcomes. Quantifying the cost of the work that gets delayed is useful.
CoD considers all the impacts to what generates new revenue, what protects existing revenue, and all the expenses associated with running an organization.
This is one of the major problems with neglected work and an important reason why we should avoid it. Once the work has sat untouched for weeks or even months, we forget the details, and it takes a long time to dive back in.
Neglected work is another term for partially completed work. Consider a partially completed bridge. It is already expensive, but it provides zero value until it’s finished.
Flag work items that haven’t moved or been updated within a certain number of days. In Figure 28 there are two flagged items, one for nine days and one for thirteen days, respectively.
These meetings should help you determine which projects are worth saving, which can be quickly wrapped up, and which are zombie projects that need to be purged.
Now, write down what happens if this item continues to be delayed for another week. Consider lowering your WIP limit and reprioritizing your WIP based on what might happen if the work is delayed. Identify the utmost valuable work currently on your board and separate out the lower value items. If possible, do an improvement blitz to push through the one highest priority item to get it delivered. Improve flow by making work visible. Remember the goal is to improve flow by making important, stale work visible.
In the same way that cross-team boards make hand-offs visible, multi-level kanban designs make multiple projects and cross-functional teamwork visible.
If the work is handed off to another team, say from Development to Operations, then the parent work items are connected to cards on the other team board. This signals hand-offs and makes work visible. It’s not uncommon to see organizations with three levels of boards: a high-level board for the portfolio level, a mid-level board for different programs or value streams, and lower-level boards for team work.
There are a number of ways to visualize repetitive tasks. I’m inspired by the sequestering approach that Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry describe in their book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life.
The board is split in half horizontally. Repetitive tasks are shown on the bottom half and standard work appears on the top half. Template cards are created for the repetitive work. The template card is prepopulated with all the info. All you have to do is copy the template and pop it in the doing lane. The overhead of filling out fields is gone, along with the excuse for keeping that work invisible.
Separate repetitive tasks in a dedicated area of your kanban board. It’s important to keep these tasks visible because they increase WIP, and their impact should be acknowledged.
Capturing data for metrics can help you become the voice of reason and prompt change in your organization. Metrics get attention.
Because many teams use arbitrary due dates to set expectations and then ultimately fail to hit that deadline, it’s time to try a smarter approach. Namely, a probabilistic approach.
If expectations are set correctly, not everything needs a due date. Being predictable is what counts. Being predicable saves time.
When it comes to forecasting how long things are going to take (remember Hofstadter’s Law), it’s useful to look at metrics that measure progress instead of activities. Some of the best metrics that show actual progress (or lack thereof) are lead time, cycle time, WIP, and aging reports.
Flow time is a measure of how long something took to do from beginning to end. You might be thinking, “Wait, that’s cycle time.” And you’d be right.
Just know that cycle time is an ambiguous term and that’s why I prefer to use flow time when discussing speed metrics in general, because it is attuned with Lean. It’s actually a main pillar of Lean.
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.
Lean organizations optimize for speed and effectiveness.
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.
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.
Aging reports reveal how long work has been sitting in the pipeline not getting done (Figure 42). Looking at the work that’s been in the system for more than sixty days (or ninety or one hundred twenty days) shines a valuable light on how much waste is in the system.
And the problem is usually not in the process time—it’s in the wait time. Focus on the wait time and not on the process time. What should the batch size of items be for delivery purposes? What is the optimal delivery rate?
The reduction of batch size is a critical principle of Lean manufacturing. Small batches allow manufacturers to slash work in process and accelerate feedback, which, in turn, improves cycle times, quality, and efficiency. Small batches have an even greater advantage in software development because code is hard to see and spoils quickly if not integrated into production.
Small batch sizes enable fast and predictable lead times in most value streams, which is why there is a relentless focus on creating a smooth and even flow of work.
Invest energy in collecting metrics that help you make decisions. —Eric Ries
The intent here is to look at metrics that reveal high risk. Common metrics such as the number of story points completed over a period of time (velocity), the number of bugs that escaped into production, or the number of deployments to production don’t reveal very much about risk.
I’m going to argue here that time theft should be measured by the things that cause the problems in the first place and prevent your teams from delivering quality work quickly: too much WIP, unplanned work, neglected work, conflicting priorities, and unknown dependencies. These are the causes behind mediocre work done too slowly.
Each of these time thieves can be captured using work item types and card tags o...
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Let the flow manage the processes, and not let management manage the flow. —Taiichi Ohno
The goal of the recurring monthly operations reviews is to collectively look at the data to see and understand the health of the organization. A disciplined and consistent review of organizational health provides a great opportunity for continuous improvement.
The reviews are organization-wide and involve senior leaders, managers, leads, and individual contributors to communicate that the organization takes performance seriously by setting an expectation for objective, data-driven, quantitative management. In other words, operations reviews are one way in which we can make work more visible by seeing what has come before.
In order to understand how we are doing, what the risks are, and how to improve predictability, Ops reviews show how the teams actually performed the previous month against promises/expectations.
Throughput: Throughput is how many things were completed over a period of time. One way to show throughput is with a CFD. The CFD will also show the ratio of incoming requests against completed requests and the amount of WIP at each stage of the workflow.
Flow time: Look at how long it took items to move across the board from the time work was pulled into an in-progress column through delivery.
Issues and blocked work items: Identify any major issues or blocked work that is preventing the team from making progress. This will help people understand why things took so long and know what changes are underway to prevent those problems from happening again.
The Time Thief O’Gram: Select one or more time thieves to report on to expose their theft.
Additional metrics you may want to consider presenting: Aging reports Card type distribution Failure load (value demand versus failure demand)...
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For each metric, we want to track the trend over time so we can see the improvements (or not). If we are to demonstrate continuous improvement, we want the mean trend to improve over time. To demonstrate predictability, we want the spread of variation to decrease over time.
When the stand-up is done in front of a visual board, it is obvious what people are working on. When it comes to the stand-up, get to the point. Is there anything blocked? Is there any invisible work? Is there something we should know about?
Instead of going around the room, we set a policy that the board must be updated and accurate prior to 9:00 a.m. This allowed people to simply look at the board to see the latest status, and the stand-up could be spent focusing on risk and uncertainty.
What work is at risk of becoming blocked?
