Making Work Visible — A Top of the Page Review

September 2023

I’m a sucker for practical solutions. I’ve been known to wax poetic about a clever solution that resolves a problem bedeviling my team. (Yep, that is exactly as dorky as it sounds!)

I love good solutions. And this book is full of them.

DeGrandis, Dominica. 2017. Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work and Flow. Portland, OR: IT Revolution.

Quick Summary

This book tackles a common issue for technology teams: invisible work. Technology teams are busy all of the time, but decision makers frequently fail to see or understand how much work IT has at a given moment.

The author identifies five time thieves that make it hard for teams to manage their workload.

• Too much work in progress (WIP)
• Unknown dependencies
• Unplanned work
• Conflicting priorities
• Neglected work

Within this book are achievable strategies to tackle invisible work. Drawing heavily on Toyota’s system of lean production (particularly the Kanban system of managing work in progress), the author offers solutions to make work visible to all stakeholders so that work flows predictably. Strategies include:

• Limiting work in progress
• Measuring and managing the flow of work
• Prioritizing effectively (to manage change)
• Making process adjustments based on feedback and metrics

The author’s tactics are often low tech and perfectly suited to a services team within a larger organization. But they can easily be adapted to many other environments as well. In fact, I found myself using some of them to help my teenager manage his school workload and improve time management.

Key Takeaways

Change Management

The problem of invisible work is not confined to technology teams, of course. It is a problem that many companies encounter, particularly the small businesses that I work with as a process consultant.

Often the issue stems from poor change management. Small businesses face a real challenge: too much work with too few resources. Demand is higher than capacity for their teams. As a result they are faced with rapidly changing priorities that often leave them starting projects without finishing the old ones.

When priorities change — on projects or in business initiatives — it is vital to pause and reset. Without a reset, today’s highest priority work gets added to yesterday’s priorities. And when everything is important, nothing matters.

Unplanned work and constant context switching destroy productivity. The time lost by pausing is made up when teams can plan and execute their limited resources effectively.

Good change management safely surfaces uncertainty. Uncertainty is a cancer that creates unrealistic expectations. When team members are hesitant to acknowledge their uncertainty for fear of repercussions or executive disengagement, the results are predictable: loss of motivation, loss of innovation, and loss of momentum.

Project Management

A common mistake among rookie project managers is to schedule all people and resources to 100% utilization to avoid “waste.” Many business owners — new and seasoned alike — fall into the same trap. Afraid of wasting money or returning less value if their team members are not 100% scheduled on revenue generating work, they provide no room for the inevitable variability of work.

They fail to account for the routine administrative overhead required to keep the business running smoothly. So when easily predictable variability occurs (like a crucial email that requires careful diplomacy and takes extra time to write), team members fall behind and find themselves buried under a mountain of invisible work. Every small deviation from their impossible schedule compounds and soon routine activity requires emergency triage.

Failure to incorporate administrative overhead and work variability into the production schedule causes team burnout. Every work plan needs to include room for variability. Most experienced project managers consider 75% scheduled to be full utilization. If the project is innovative or complex, even 75% is probably overscheduled.

Memorable Quotes

1️⃣

“It’s hard to manage invisible work. With invisible work, we don’t notice the explicit reminders that our mental budget is already full. There is not time to simply think.”

2️⃣

“Good time-management means spending time on important things and not just urgent things.”

3️⃣

“Busyness can be an addiction for terminally wired ambitious people. But busyness does not equate to growth or improvement or value. Busyness often means just doing so many things at once that they all turn out crappy.”

4️⃣

“Unpredictable events cause variability, and the more variability, the more vulnerable we are to capacity overload.”

Final Thoughts

Invisible work is not a problem confined to IT. Making work visible is the easiest and most effective way to boost productivity. Visible work honors the constraints and commitment of the people doing the work. It shifts command-and-control to collaborate and construct.

Make work better for people by making their work visible to all.

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Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?