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

by Dominica Degrandis

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.

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.

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

A team of engineers who look really busy but who are not completing project features are a red flag. Having a bunch of projects that are sitting at 90% complete does the company no good.

Old software in itself is not a problem. Old software that is not maintained and is not part of an automated build, test, and deploy process is a problem.

People take on more WIP when they are unclear on priorities.

The reason we care about queue size is because the bigger the queue, the longer things take. What I’ve drawn is the curve described by the Kingman’s formula (an approximation for the average waiting time in a queue). What it shows is the relation between utilization and wait time (Figure 41).

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.

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.

To put it another way, when the company has a culture that is focused on keeping people busy (instead of on keeping work flowing), it invariably results in overloading people with too much WIP. This is not a productive culture. We want to avoid the mistake of having a goal to keep people busy all the time when the goal should be to generate value for the business.