Visualize reoccurring costs
This post is part of 101 ideas for agile teams.
Context
There is a lot of reoccurring work that your team has to handle. For example:
- the same support questions are asked multiple times
- the same workaround has to be coded frequently because of technical debt
But it is hard to distinguish between the work that really is reoccurring and costs you a lot of time, and work that has to be repeated seldom.
Action
Visualize the reoccurring tasks and measure how many times they occur and how much effort they require:
- Whenever there is a new reoccurring task discovered, put it on a whiteboard or wall in your office.
- Whenever an already discovered task is reoccurring, add the date of the occurrence and the effort invested.
Take a look at your reoccurring tasks board from time to time and sum up the efforts per task. Take this data into a retrospective and decide with your team, where you want to put your energy to find solutions to reoccurring tasks so that they will never come back again.
Gather data and make a decision based on facts — not just your gut feeling.
What you gain
Less work on reoccurring tasks.
More insights into how to maximize the team’s capacity for delivering software.
How to strengthen
Cluster reoccurring tasks into themes so that it gets easier to track them on the wall/whiteboard/board.
At the daily Scrum ask the question whether there was any work done on reoccurring tasks. People tend to forget to track these cumbersome tasks because they want to be finished with them as soon as possible.
Risks
You invest too much time into tracking small things, which in itself is a reoccurring task. Define a time-box for gathering the data.
Please help me improve this idea by providing feedback.
More ideas at 101 ideas for agile teams
Many thanks to bbv Software Services for making this blog post possible.
