Making Work Visible by Domenica DeGrandis
Date finished 27 Jan 2021
Recommendation: 7.5/10
Accessible guide to making work visible; exposing time thieves and using Kanban practices to improve flow. So easy to read it’s great as a refresher for practitioners and a strong entry point for pretty much everyone else.
Notes
- Make work visible.
- Limit work-in-progress (WIP).
- Measure and manage the flow of work.
- Prioritise effectively.
- Make adjustments based on lessons from feedback and metrics.
The 5 thieves of time
- Too much work in progress (WIP)
- Unknown dependencies
- Unplanned work
- Conflicting priorities
- Neglected work
How to expose time theft to optimise workflow
- Make work visible
- Make WIP visible and limit it
- Expose dependencies
- Unplanned work
- Prioritise
- Prevent negligence
Flow metrics
- Flow time: a measure of how long something took to do from beginning to end.
- Cycle time: ambiguous - different meanings depending on who you ask.
- WIP is a leading indicator.
- Little’s Law assumptions
- All measure units are consistent.
- Average arrival rate = average departure rate.
- All work that enters the system flows to competion and exists.
- Average age of WIP is neither increasing or decreasing.
- The total amount of WIP is roughly the same at the beginning and at the end.
- Queuing Theory
- There’s a direct correlation between WIP and capacity utilization.
- Unpredictable events cause variability. The more variability, the more vulnerable we are to capacity overload.
- The single biggest factor that affects queue size is capacity utilization.
- Kingman’s formula shows an approximation for the average wait time in a queue.
- As we move from 60%-80% utilization, the queue doubles. As we move from 80%-90% it doubles again.
Finding out where waste is emerging
- Consider measuring:
- Unplanned work
- Unknown dependencies
- Conflicting priorities
- Neglacted work
- Reporting
- Aging reports
- Card type distribution
- Failure load (value demand vs failure demand)
- Flow efficiency
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