Making Work Visible Quotes

“Businesses frequently prioritize new feature releases over fixing technical debt. They choose to work on revenue-generating work instead of revenue-protection work. This rarely works out as the business hopes, particularly as problems discovered during the final stages of uncompleted projects drag engineers away from the newer projects.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“Making work visible is one of the most fundamental things we can do to improve our work because the human brain is designed to find meaningful patterns and structures in what is perceived through vision. Thus, it makes sense that when we can’t see our work, we have a hard time managing it.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“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.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“As Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“A user interface (UI) developer named Dwayne Johnson recognized the value in delivering small changes frequently and began socializing the idea of making small improvements on a consistent schedule.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“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.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“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.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“At Corbis, looking at the reasons why we worked on too many things at once was a revealing exercise. The CFO wanted to implement a new financial system. The SVP of Global Marketing wanted to blah, blah, blah. The VP of Media Services also wanted blah, blah, blah. The head of Sales wanted blah, blah, blah, blah. And they all wanted everything now. The resulting business priorities clashed all the way down the hierarchy and that was just the business side of the house. On the engineering side, not only did we need to implement all the business requests, we also had our own internal improvements to make and maintenance work to do. Furthermore, we still had to be available to drop everything when production issues occurred—like it or not, production comes first.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“Code will be used in ways we cannot anticipate, in ways it was never designed for, and for longer than it was ever intended. —Joshua Corman”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“The notion of flow in humans doesn’t happen when context switching is the norm.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“There is a reason our schools and offices are plastered with whiteboards. We acquire more information through vision than through all the other senses combined.1 Of the 100 billion neurons in our brains, approximately 20% are devoted to analyzing visual information.2 The visual-spatial learner thinks primarily in images. A study done by psychologist and founder of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, Linda Kreger Silverman, suggests that two-thirds of the population have a visual-spatial preference.3 The left hemisphere is sequential, analytical, and time-oriented. The right hemisphere perceives the whole, synthesizes, and apprehends movement in space. For visual-spatial learners, if the right hemisphere is not activated and engaged, then attention will be low and learning will be poor.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow