5 Time Thieves:
- Too Much Work-in-Progress
- Unknown Dependencies
- Unplanned Work
- Conflicting Priorities
- Neglected Work
based on the book "Making Work Visible" by Dominica DeGrandis - link to book
Time Thief #1 - Too Much Work-In-Progress
Work-in-Progress: all the stuff you've started, but not yet finished. partially completed work.
The problem with too much Work-In-Progress:
• Creates context switching
• Reduces motivation
• Generates anxiety and overwhelm
• Prevents work from being finished
• Quality suffers and work gets neglected
• Creates an environment for other time thieves to do their work
What to do about it:
• Make work tasks more visible
• Unveil hidden work that puts demands on our time
• Limit active work in a phase
• Delay assigning work till workers are ready for work
• Prioritize work tasks as a team
• Before starting a new work task, finish an active work task.
• Use pull policies to move work.
Time Thief #2 - Unknown Dependencies
Dependencies: a task that relies on the completion or starting of a different task.
The problem with
Unknown Dependencies:
• Every dependency increases the probability of late delivery
• Rushed work and reduced quality
• Missing information passed on
• Surprises occur
• People are unavailable when needed
• Change to work is doubled
• One team's performance may be high at the expense of another team
What to do about it:
• Highlight dependencies - make them obvious
• Prioritize dependent work
• Eliminate and reduce dependencies
• Schedule dependent work hand-offs
• Status indicators for preceding work
• Early coordination of dependent items
• Use more hand-offs with smaller amounts of work transferred
• Develop better hand-off routines
Time Thief #3 - Unplanned Work
Unplanned Work: interruptions that prevent you from finishing something or from stopping at a better breaking point.
The problem with Unplanned Work:
• Creates interruptions & context switching
• Inserts uncertainty to the teams demand
• Increases Work-in-Progress
• Promotes a reactive culture (firefighting)
• Generates conflicting priorities
What to do about it:
• Determine what constitutes unplanned work and what doesn't
• Ensure that any unplanned work is visible to all team members
• Assess how unplanned work affects other projects
• Track the reasons behind its occurrence
• Develop a process to manage and prioritize unplanned work effectively
• Learn to decline or delay unplanned tasks that are not important now
Time Thief #4 - Conflicting Priorities
Priority: organizing a task in order of importance, value, or urgency.
The problem with Conflicting Priorities:
• Everything is a PRIORITY 1
• Nothing is a priority
• Individuals decide the company's priorities
• Politics and persuasion rule
• Valuable work gets delayed
• Important deep work gets left till the end
• One project wins over another with no rules
• Cherry-picking tasks
• Working very long hours
• Multi-tasking and lower work quality
• Dependent work is delivered late
What to do about it:
• Make "current" and "next up" priorities visible to all (use a system)
• Prioritize work regularly. e.g. daily or weekly
• Limit active work-in-progress per person (no multi-tasking / task-switching)
• Team agrees to a prioritization method (eg. FIFO = First In First Out)
• Develop a process for "High Priority" work and develop qualifications for work to enter
• Check-in with leadership to resolve priority conflicts
Time Thief #5 - Neglected Work
Neglect: fail to care for properly.
The problem with Neglected Work:
• Often hidden and invisible
• Erodes trust with stakeholders
• Work is perishable and rots
• Key information is forgotten
• Feedback drought - loses direction
• Often becomes an emergency eventually
• Improvement work is often neglected
• Lost expectations - compass is lost
• Promotes a culture of cherry-picking
• Decreased morale - a fading flame
What to do about it:
• Kill low-value time-consuming work
• Prioritize and schedule work types that often get neglected
• Be realistic about what is important
• Use flow metrics to measure the work (e.g. flow velocity, flow efficiency, etc.)
• Make the work visible
• Make work objectives smaller packets
• Experiment & measure outcomes