The Five Thieves of Time

1. Too Much Work-In-Progress (WIP)
2. Unknown Dependencies
3. Unplanned Work
4. Conflicting Priorities
5. Neglected Work

| Objection | Response | Key Metric | | — | — | — | | Things take too long | Here’s how long things actually take to do | Flow Time measures speed. Clock starts when work begins and ends when customer can consume value | | Not enough features get delivered |The capacity of the teams is often less than the demand. Teams are constrained by conflicting priorities. |Flow velocity measures throughput - the number of items completed over a period of time; this is useful for gauging capacity | | We should just outsource this to vendors | Outsourcing this work will likely insert more dependencies into the workflow, which impacts efficiency due to back-and-forth communication delays | Flow efficiency the ratio of wait time vs active time. Prompts the reasonable question, “Do we need more wait states in our toolset to accurately reflect all the ait time in the value stream?” | | We need features to be delivered, but you just want to refactor architecture | We need to change the oil in the car every now and then. Otherwise, we won’t have a car to drive.” | Flow distribution the distribution of different work types, e.g. 30% features, 60% defects, 10% debt | | We are at risk of not completing all the initiatives on this year’s roadmap | Attempting to do too many things at once results in lower quality and slower delivery. IT’s why Steve Jobs killed many great ideas at Apple, so they could do fewer things really well. | Flow load the amount of work started but not yet finished. Lots of partially completed work-in-progress (WIP) is expensive |

Chapter Key Takeaways

The Five Thieves of Time

Too Much Work-In-Progress

• We have a tendency to say yes to any request, regardless of how busy we are.
• Too much WIP prevents us from completing work on time, causes quality to suffer, increases costs, and irritates staff
• Work-in-progress and cycle time have a relationship. HIgh WIP means that other items sit idle, waiting for attention longer (Little’s Law)
• Context switching, which wastes time, is a major consequence of too much WIP
• We must learn to say no to additional work when our schedules are full

Unknown Dependencies

• It’s expensive when teams are unaware of mutually critical information
• Architecture, expertise, and activities on hold are some of the common dependencies you might run into
• Every dependency increases the probability you will be late. If possible, reduce dependencies to save time and money and to avoid complications. Conversely, every dependency you can find and eliminate doubles your chances of delivering on time.
• When coordination needs are high, people aren’t available when you need time. The same is true for experts - when demand for a skill is high, experts are unavailable.
• When it comes to dependencies, individual team performance can increase to the detriment of company-wide performance

Unplanned Work

• Unplanned work adds unpredictability to the system
• It’s all about predictability and expectations. Unplanned work eats expectations for breakfast
• High-performing companies spend less time working on unplanned work than lower-performing companies
• Sometimes we have no choice but to drop current projects to focus on urgent unplanned work
• Unplanned work steals away from planned work
• Unplanned work is hard to see, but it can be made visible. Kanban helps to combat and better anticipate unplanned work by making work visible.
• Plan for unplanned work by reserving capacity for when it arrives

Conflicting Priorities

• There is one most important thing - let people know what it is
• Conflicting priorities occur when people are uncertain what the highest priority is. This leads to too much WIP, which leads to longer cycle times.
• Conflicting priorities that compete for the same people and resources block flow and increase partially completed work
• What we see as a priority frequently clashes with what others see as a priority

Neglected Work

• Not dealt with, important neglected work eventually becomes emergent
• Beware of invisible technical debt accruing while teams are sidetracked by short-term priorities
• Acknowledge zombie projects. Consider the impact they have on completing high-value projects. Either give them the attention they need or kill them.

How to Expose Time Theft to Optimize Workflow

Too Much Work-In-Progress

• Visual-spatial learners think in pictures rather than in works. They have a different brain oprganization than auditory-sequential learners. They learn better by seeing than by hearing. Remember - 2/3 of the population are visual-spatial learners
• 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
• Visuals can show business pain points and other hidden information
• We can use visual systems like kanban boards to help make work visible

Ambush the Ringleader

• Thief Too Much WIP infiltrates all the other time thieves, upping their damage and making them all the more difficult to control
• There are many ways to set WIP limits, WIP limits per column, per work-item types, or per swimlane are common options
• WIP limits create the necessary tension in the system. They are the constraint that enables people to complete work
• Invisible WIP has a cost, so make it visible
• Categorizing work by who requested it is just a single approach to visualizing work. It’s one that brings visibility to the communication involved - internal, external, or leadership
• Visualizing work through the lens of flow improves team communication and understanding
• The combination of pictures and writing meets our desire for a unified language. Use this combo to your advantage.

Expose Dependencies

• Small teams can move fast, but if there are dependencies between them, you pay the prive of not being in a position to move fast as a whole organization
• Design your board(s) to highlight dependencies to keep Thief Unknown Dependencies far away
• Visually call out dependencies so they can be broadcasted widely to reduce expensive business pain
• Visualize dependencies between different teams’ kanban boards
• Organize around product teams to reduce the problems associated with projects

The Perfect Crime - Unplanned Work

• There will always be unplanned work, therefore you should plan for unplanned work
• Knowing the ratio of unplanned work to planned work helps you plan workload capacity
• Size doesn’t really matter when it comes to WIP limits - it doesn’t matter how big or small a chunk of work is when yout ruly focus on just one thing at a time
• A consistent time and place for office hours and do not disturb hours helped to minimize the damage from unplanned work

Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize

• People take on more WIP when they are unclear on priorities. Establish an explicit prioritization policy to avoid too much WIP
• The A3 problem-solving approach encourages precise communication in an effective structure that cultivates understanding and argreement. FOr more on A3, read Managing to Learn by John Shook
• There are many ways to prioritize: Assigned priority, Cost of Delay (CoD), First In First Out (FIFO), Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HIPPO), Weighted shortest job first (WSJF) are some of these options
• Visualize priorities so people are crystal clear on what constitutes the most important work
• Think about the line of commitment. Bring clear visibility to work that is prioritized and fully committed but, if competing with other projects, will increase its cost of delay.

Preventing Negligence

• Delayed important work becomes urgent, unplanned work
• Visualize delays
• Call out neglected work and purge low value projects

Useful Board Design Examples

• Multilevel boards prodive a big-picture view of workflow across the organization as a whole
• Small tasks may not need to be tracked on a board, but consider if adding them to the board is helpful to promote cross-training, give visibility to someone’s work, or notify another team about the existence of a dependency
• PO Boards can provide the metrics needed to get buy-in on changes to traditional accounting systems

Metrics, Feedback, and Calibration

Your Metrics of Your Money

• Delays are common; use metrics, particularly flow metrics, to help you make good decisions on priorities, WIP limits, and capacity utilization
• Stop letting yourself and your team reach 100% capacity utilization
• Look for the optimal batch size to help you achieve efficiency while keeping transaction cost down

The Time Thief O’Gram

• The Time Thief O’Gram reveals which thieves are at work in your organization and how much they are stealing
• The metrics from the Time Thief O’Gram provide transparency for leaders eager to see the issues facing teams. These are an excellent source for getting executive buy-in to do the things necessary to improve predictability and reduce risk.

Operations Review

• Operations reviews are an opportunity to present objective metrics that can form a foundation for improvement
• Use time-boxing to keep operations reviews and speakers from running long
• Good metrics for operations reviews include throughput, flow time, and time theft along with issues and blocked items.
• Track metrics over time so that you can see what improvements have been made or still need to be made

The Art of the Meeting

• Lean Coffee allows people to discuss the topics they want in a fun, respectful, and efficient setting
• Organize and flow Lean Coffee topics through a kanban once they have been voted on
• Using a board to show the status of work allows stand-up time to be spent discussing problems and uncovering invisible work.
• Holding stand-ups at a regular cadence sat the same location reduces uncertainty

Beastly Practices

• Don’t exclude times when people aren’t “supposed” to be working from metrics or the metrics will be skewed
• Look for alternatives to ineffective accounting methods. Just because they are “the way things have always been done,” doesn’t mean the represent the only (or best) way to do them
• Consider replacing Gantt charts with queues
• Beware of individually named swimlanes
• Simplify meeting tools whenever possible
• Make kanban boards (and other presentation materials) visually appealing to engage viewers
• Best practices have their place, particularly when it comes to simple routine tasks, but it’s often a better idea to conduct your own experiments to discover what truly works for your situation and organization