Read a Book #3 — Making Work Visible — Dominica De Grandis
Making Work Visible is an awesome book that I read a few years ago and have recently picked up again. The central idea is that making the work everyone in the team is doing ‘visible’ pays massive dividends in efficiency. The book is really practical without getting overly into prescribing a particular methodology or framework for managing your work.
Overall Impressions
I felt a bit silly when I first read this book, I had read Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum which explains benefits of focused work with the concept of ‘sprints’ with a clearly defined goal and scope but I really hadn’t fully internalised the benefits of focus and limiting WIP. Making work visible was so clear and straightforward in showing me that the usual ways of working were holding me back in a big way. The writing is so clear and the use of visuals and practical exercises throughout is a great inclusion as Dominca De Grandis really practices what she preaches by visualising the concepts of the book.
The author is from an IT background so the examples reflect this but the principles are so universal I think the book is really accessible to everyone.
The book is brilliant good and highly recommended for anyone who wants to take the pressure of their teams whilst developing more predictable estimation and reliable delivery.
Some ideas I liked
The five thieves of time!
The time thieves are all too familiar but the great thing about this book is how well the impact of the thieves and how they occur is explained. The thieves are:
- Too much Work-in-Progress — You can do your work faster and better when you focus.
- Unknown Dependencies — Coordination is hard and being delayed waiting for others to finish is not fun.
- Unplanned Work — Last minute jobs ruin all the plans.
- Conflicting Priorities — Let people know what the most important thing is.
- Neglected Work — Leave a problem to fester and it will probably get worse.
The benefits of visual management
The book clearly explains how our propensity for understanding patterns and structures visually. By visualising our work teams can quickly and easily communicate what is going on and spot issues as they occur. There are loads of examples of different ways to visualise the tasks that need to be done and make informed decisions about prioritisation and delays.
WIP Limits
The idea of WIP limits is really obvious but very hard for a lot of us to achieve. Putting a formal limit on how many tasks we work on at a time makes it easier for teams to prioritise and forces us to get the difficult, old or less interesting of the to do list before starting on the next thing. A WIP limit can also help those people in the organisation who are always the go-to person who often get overburdened by requests that could also be done by others. This is a massive issue I seen in IA as people start new tasks to keep busy during delays etc. and then end up working on multiple priority activities all at once. WIP limits can help smooth the demand and give people a better balance of work.
Neglected Work
This one really rang true to me as well. Many of us have old tasks sitting around in a backlog somewhere. By delaying we add the overhead of getting back up to speed and the potential knock on effects of dependencies others may have on completion of the task. That audit file that needs closing down, email that needs responding to or staff evaluation that needs to get done is not going to do itself and holding onto it doesn’t make it any easier. Delayed work also has the tendency to turn into URGENT work that can derail something else. Suggestions like using visual cues or aging reports to show tasks that have been sitting around a long time can help focus on neglected work and either complete it or make the decision to strike it off the list,
Measurement
Audit is very bad at measuring our progress. Traditional approaches use timesheets to measure how many hours or days have been used in a budget but seldom do we have measurements that show us how efficient we are (e.g cycle time). A great quote from the book is:
“Watch the work, Not the People”
Measuring how many hours someone is working on a project as a whole is not any real benefit for having insight into how well the project is going and how likely we are to deliver efficiently. Flow measurements like cycle time, help us understand how quickly tasks are moving through the workflow and identify areas of constraint where work may be sitting idle waiting on someone or something. Imagine an audit function where we knew how long it takes to complete each control test, or write each finding report and this information was used to identify ways to improve and how to make the process more efficient. Forecasting and estimating can be more accurate and we have more real-time insights into where projects are going off the rails.
How will I use this in IA?
Visualise work, is the basic premise and this is the first step for me. I have started recording all my work on a visual board to focus my mind on aged items and remind me to limit WIP.
Being able to measure cycle time and the overall flow of work through the audit process is a worthy goal that I am really keen to achieve. Being able to more clearly understand flow is one of the benefits of using engineering focused work management tools rather than basic spreadsheets or audit specific tools that are not built for visual management. I explore this further in The IA Toolchain #3 — IA, its Spreadsheets all the way down.
See Also: Dominica talking about “Making Work Visible” on youtube . She uses examples from IT, to marketing and accounting and shows how the principles work in loads of different types of work.
Making Work Visible: How to Unmask Capacity Killing WIP — Dominica DeGrandis
