We recommend: Dominica DeGrandis — 'Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow'
Visibility is the first step to measurability
We recently read Dominica DeGrandis’ Making Work Visible, an inspiring book on visualizing work-in-progress to help improve your teams’ flow.
Our Thoughts
When we do a proper Root Cause Analysis1 on symptoms such as delayed delivery, unplanned work2, and scatter of focus, we often find lack of visibility at the center of it all.
Dominica comes with many practical ideas to help track and visualize many aspects of a team. When you follow the recommendations mentioned in the book, you will be able to have data to help you understand and resolve some of the inefficiencies of your team.
After having played around with these practical recommendations, you will be surprised to see how much unknown work you’ll discover which eats up precious time from your team. After all:
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.
Call to Action
If you’re still skeptical to trying out some of the ideas mentioned in this book, I would recommend you spend 2 hours going through your last couple of sprints. Label the tickets which were unplanned work and look at what percentage these occur at. You will quickly realize that you’re missing quite some things that were actually done but were never captured on your board. Then hopefully you will understand why it’s essential to make work visible.