November 12, 2019

Making Work Visible – Part 1

Our book club (Houston Miller and Jameson McGhee) started on our third book Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow by Dominica DeGrandis and Tonianne DeMaria.

Although Jameson has already read the book, we all agreed it would be worth our time to give it a thorough read given the many takeaways Jameson has shared while discussing our other books.

Introduction: Work and Flow

  • (Most of the highlights Geoff had Jameson said will be coming up for more in-depth discussion later in the book. For context of this post, I’ll list what those highlights were.)
  • Losing time due to avoidable problems is expensive and dispiriting.
  • We workers are drowning in nonstop requests for our time.
  • This context switching kills our ability to settle into work and concentrate sufficiently. As a result, we are unhappy with the quality of our work despite our desire for it to be good.
  • The amount of requests (the demand) and the amount of time people have to handle the requests (their capacity) is almost always unbalanced.
  • Multitasking is a good way to screw up progress, as I’m sure many of you reading this book know from experience.
  • 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.
  • Busyness can be an addition for terminally wired ambitious people. But busyness does not equate to growth or improvement or value.
    • All of us agreed we’ve had days like this. Geoff: “I kept all these plates spinning, but why are we spinning them?”
  • But horrors if an engineer sits idle for fifteen minutes simple thinking.
  • Many companies today are in survival mode, they just can’t see it.

The Five Thieves of Time

  1. Too much work-in-progress (WIP)
  2. Unknown dependencies
  3. Unplanned work
  4. Conflicting priorities
  5. Neglected work

Time Thief 1: Too Much Work-in-Progress

  • People have a hard time saying no.
    • We are team players
    • We fear humiliation
    • We like new/shiny
    • We don’t realize how much work it will be until we’re in it
    • We like to please people
  • It’s not realistic to have every minute of the day scheduled. 100% utilization is not sustainable.
  • Cycle time — amount of time an item spends as WIP
  • Humans incur overhead when context switching between different tasks, and it’s irritating: You’re rarely left with enough time to do a good job, nor with sufficient space to master the task or skill.
  • We discussed about how one goes about setting WIP limit numbers. You could set it up so that each person on your team only does one thing, or that your entire team only works on one story. The best practice seems to be measure and adapt.