All posts tagged “Making Work Visible

Making Work Visible – Part 8

This week we wrapped up the book by discussing the art of the meeting, beastly practices, and the conclusion. The Art of the Meeting Lean Coffee has some of the feel of an Agile retrospective, but it’s about more than…

Making Work Visible – Part 7

This week we talked about metrics, making time thieves visible, and the operations review. Your Metrics or Your Money The idea of using a probabilistic approach instead of a hard estimate is something Geoff had seen in Waltzing with Bears:…

Making Work Visible – Part 6

This week we talked about preventing negligence and useful board design examples. Preventing Negligence Each of us has experienced the “let’s add this other fix while the hood is up” situation. The author mentioned a circumstance where there were tickets…

Making Work Visible – Part 5

This week we talked about exposing unplanned work and prioritizing work. The Perfect Crime: Unplanned Work Find a system of tracking every time you get interrupted. This could be putting a sticky note on the board for every task you…

Making Work Visible – Part 4

This week we talked about ambushing the problem of too much WIP and exposing dependencies. Ambush the Ringleader We spent a fair amount of discussion around the value of swimlanes on a kanban board. All of us have used the…

Making Work Visible – Part 3

This week we talked about the last thief of time (neglected work) and exposing time theft using a kanban board. Thief of Time: Neglected Work Zombie projects (not dead, but not getting attention either) are like old servers. The person…

Making Work Visible – Part 2

This week we talked about three other thieves of time: unknown dependencies, unplanned work, and conflicting priorities. Thief of Time: Unknown Dependencies Dependencies can be architecture, expertise, or sequential activities. If you’re the only skillset expert, you are a bottleneck….

Making Work Visible – Part 1

Our book club (Houston Miller and Jameson McGhee) started on our third book Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow by Dominica DeGrandis and Tonianne DeMaria. Although Jameson has already read the book, we all agreed…