Learning is not compulsory...neither is survival.
—W. Edwards Deming

2.1

MAKE WORK VISIBLE

Take a look at Figure 4, an illustration by Philippe Kruchten.1 (I’ve modified it to be hand drawn and I’ve used different colors.) It’s a superb visual for highlighting important differences between visible and invisible work. A quick glance at this visual returns a meaningful message. Like a visual language, we see the relationship between invisible and visible work with respect to both negative and positive value. Highlighted in blue, “Architecture” radiates positive value. Unless it’s an old, customized, fragile JDE implementation, wherein it would fall into the yellow technical debt area.

Figure 4. Visibility Grid

The image is a superb example of good visualization. It displays the four elements necessary to make a visual work: structure, usefulness, relevance, and honesty. This is what we want to accomplish when we make our work visible: easy on the eyes, accurate, meaningful, and efficient at a glance.

Once we have visibility of our work, we have the tools to manage the problems that slow our workflow down and are able to create the solutions for the unexpected when it arrives.

Another thing to consider when looking at the impact of relaying information visually is that two-thirds of the population are visual-spatial learners. Visibility matters when a majority of people think in pictures rather than in words. It’s also important to know that this isn’t a learned preference, visual-spatial learners have a different brain organization than auditory-sequential learners. They learn better by seeing than by hearing.2 What does this mean? It means that it’s a struggle for potentially two-thirds of your team when they can’t see the flow and priority of the work they are doing. Making work visible allows your team to level up because it works with how their brains work instead of against it.

This section is a starting point for making your and your team’s work visible. I’ll be discussing different aspects of creating a kanban board as well as different ideas and concepts that help in understanding why they are important in the larger context of your work. The goal here is to show how making our work visible is an extraordinarily simple way to show our work demand—the amount and the type of work requested from us by everyone, including ourselves—and begin fixing the time-thief problem. You just have to jump in and start doing it to reap the benefits.

And kanban boards are all about jumping in because they start with an amazingly simple core—the To Do, Doing, Done design (Figure 5). The genius of this board design is that it’s self-explanatory—you need to start working on something (to do), are working on something (doing), or are finished with working on something (done). Creating this straightforward kind of board is easy for anyone to do. You can apply it to all your tasks (your demand).

Figure 5. The To Do, Doing, Done Board

It also organizes your workload that may have otherwise been hard to see, or outright invisible, in a single view. Imagine this board hanging in your office: It’s so simple and simultaneously so informative that you don’t have to explain it to others—anyone walking into your office will be able to look at the board and know what you’re are working on and understand the state that the work is in, all without interrupting you with questions. Talk about a fast meeting.

Here is an example of one of our self-explanatory boards.

Most boards are, at minimum, made up of To Do, Doing, and Done columns (or equivalent names) that represent the state that the work is in. The work is represented by the work item cards. In Figure 5, the blue squares represent work item cards.

So, how does this kind of kanban board act in real-world action at your work?

First, there are some things to take into consideration. For instance, if you have a to-do list that looks like it’s the size of War & Peace, then you may be asking if you really need to put everything on your board? No, you do not. The question becomes, what do you trim? Some things are so low on the priority list that it doesn’t make sense to clutter your To Do column with them because that will distract you from the most important work. Also, by the time you finish your top three to five priority items, your next set of priorities will probably have changed.

So, what to-dos are okay to leave off the board? What provides the right amount of visibility for the team and the right amount of transparency for the rest of the organization? The answer is: it depends. What you make visible depends on what you do and what causes your team the most pain. Another consideration is the importance on making visible the uncertainties impacting your team and your company’s business values. We’ll tackle uncertainties and business values in Part 3, so let’s focus on identifying what you do and what causes your team pain.

The guidance here for what to put on your board is to weigh the time cost of managing work items with the value received. It’s not uncommon to see teams implement a policy whereby they don’t create cards for work that takes less than fifteen minutes. Usually there are exceptions to this rule. Knowing when to break the rules is something that comes with experience.

My take on when to break the rules is when risk or uncertainty is high. Just because a task only takes ten minutes doesn’t mean it’s not important. Here are some guidelines. A ten-minute task probably doesn’t need to be tracked unless one of the following is true:

1. Only one person knows how to do it (Thief Unknown Dependencies). Making the work visible can prompt some much needed cross-training.
2. The work impacts other teams (Thief Unknown Dependencies). As discussed in Part 1, cross-team dependencies can be very expensive. The one to two minutes it takes to create a card on a board is low enough overhead to be worth cross-team communication.
3. Someone’s job primarily involves doing tasks that last fifteen minutes or less, meaning if that person’s work isn’t tracked, then it’s invisible (Thief Too Much WIP). If a lot of the work is invisible, then it’s awfully easy to pile too much WIP on top of that person’s normal workload.

When you think about how to apply this guidance for what should not go on your board and when to make exceptions, you need to start asking questions about your demand, if you haven’t already. Such as, what kind of work do you do? What kind of requests float across your desk, inbox, and chat window? What are the priorities of the work items on your list? In other words, what is the nature of your work demand? The answers will vary from team to team; different teams will have different demand. Here are examples of some of the stuff different teams do.

Each team has a different set of things they do, although sometimes they overlap. The Product Development team helps the IT Operations team troubleshoot security issues. The Marketing team helps test new features that the Product Development team delivers. Visibility across departments is something we’ll get to in Section 2.3, when we cover the topic of dependencies.

In the early days at Corbis, before we made our work visible, I experienced endless amounts of heroics on holidays, weekends, at 3:00 a.m. I always had a list in my head of all the things outside of my control that constrained my efforts—a request from out of nowhere; a two-hour-long impromptu, unproductive meeting; a new project dropped on the team while we were still finishing up an older project…you get the idea.

I ranted (mostly to myself) as I worked furiously to finish the jobs on my plate about not having enough time in the day to fit all the demand in.

I’m here to say that unnecessary, overnight heroics suck. Here’s the thing: Everyone I worked with at that time was doing the same thing. We were all overburdened with too much WIP, conflicting priorities, and a disjointed work flow, resulting in negative impacts to our health as well as to the company’s organizational health.

Looking back, I cringe at all that wasted time and how easily it would have been to alleviate the mutual pain if we had had visibility on all the work and its impacts to all the teams. But we didn’t, so our time continued to be siphoned away by invisible demand. This is why it is so important to identify what prevents you and your team from getting work done. What randomizes your day? What causes your team pain?

Identifying team pain is a portion of the Demand Analysis exercise at the end of this section. It’s satisfying and valuable because it gives permission for people to speak their minds instead of the typical restrained work language. (While ranting, just be mindful of the Lean pillar of respect for people.)

These are some examples of team pain:

Here are the top pain points that appear again and again in my Demand Analysis workshops (Thief Conflicting Priorities, at your service):

• Too many interruptions—I can’t get work done.
• Conflicting priorities—everything is priority a one.

If these are two of your team’s primary pain points, you are not alone.

One of the other lessons I took away from my time at Corbis is the need to consider other teams’ pain carefully, particularly customer pain (or business pain). By this I mean your internal customers who are unhappy about the way your work results are impacting them.

It’s important to make internal customer pain visible for a couple of reasons:

1. You are going to need your internal customers buy-in to limit WIP. Ignoring WIP limits allows the continuation of more demand than the team can handle. The cycle of being overloaded will continue and you won’t realize the benefits of flow. Unhappy people are less likely to participate in solutions. Getting buy-in to limit WIP is easier when you ease customer pain along with easing your own team pain.
2. It’s not just all about us. We must consider the whole system by using a Systems Thinking approach to optimize workflow across all teams in order to deliver business value. Optimizing in favor of one team can reduce the overall performance of the company. Organizational health includes discovering what our customers are unhappy about.

Once work demand and pain points are identified, you’ll want to consider your work item categories. Creating categories for your work allows you to see different types of work—not all work is the same! It’s important to have this clearly articulated because different types of work may have different levels of urgency and different workflows need different rules to accommodate them. When we create categories for our work, we can collect the data necessary to create the metrics for the different types of work that shows us (and leadership) the health of our system.

Your work item type categories can be based on where requests originate from or who requests the work. Alternatively, they can be based on how the work is prioritized or the states that your work flows through. Since there are numerous ways to categorize your work item types, it’s important to always consider what should be visualized in order to gather the proper data and to bring visibility to address problems.

Figure 6. Balanced Work Item Types

Sometimes, the boss or just a few people determine the whole team’s work item categories. This is something to avoid. The people doing the work should always be involved with designing their workflow management system for two reasons:

1. It helps ensure you have the right number and types of categories that cover the needs and demand of your entire team.
2. When people participate in creating something, they have ownership, which motivates them to invest in solving problems and achieving desired outcomes.

When deciding the number of categories, I’ve found that somewhere between three and seven is good. Any more than that and it becomes hard to manage, because for each category, you may have different rules, different metrics, and potentially different workflows.

The important thing to call out is that the Ops team in this example based their categories on their demand and the problems (team pain) they wanted to make visible. In this case, the volume of unplanned work and lack of capacity for making team improvements.

When you define your work item type categories, you are creating a legend to help your team work with a kanban board effectively. It also allows others, from management to other teams, to interpret the board when they see it.

Once you list the work your team does, determine your team and business pain points, and create your work item categories, you can start filling in some more detailed aspects of your work to further develop your team’s visibility.

This detailed information will go in the fields of a work item. Again, involve the people who do the work for agreement on what data should take up space on the card. The information on the card should answer these questions: “What data do you need to manage workflow?” And “What do you want to measure?”

Here’s a sample list that is in no way exhaustive but should get you up and running:

• Card ID
• Header
• Title
• Description
• Assignee(s)
• Comment section
• Tags for query capability
• Icons for extra visibility
• Priority
• Subtasks or connected card fields
• Date field for date driven requests

Figure 7. Work Item Type Example

Once you have your work item card designed, your team can immediately create cards for the work they are currently doing and pop these cards on your board. At a single glance, you’ve got a pretty good view of what your team is working on. Figure 8 is from an IT Operations team who categorized their work based on the combined desire to balance internal requests (team improvements) and business requests, and the need to support both unplanned work and regularly scheduled maintenance. On this board, the team just finished an expedited request (yellow), and they’re currently working on one business request (blue) and one maintenance item (green). Next up in the To Do column is a team improvement item and a business request (orange) (blue).

Figure 8. To Do, Doing, Done Board with Colors

Often, teams need more granularity within the Doing column. It’s common to see a Doing column split out further to represent some kind of feedback, test, or validation work before the work moves to Done, as seen in Figure 9. Initially, there is a degree of reader involvement necessary to render board transitions meaningful, but after several views it becomes obvious that cards are now in a different state: The business request is now in review, and the maintenance work is still being implemented.

Figure 9. Expanded Doing Column

Things really start to become visible when you have a To Do, Doing, Done board with some work items on it (as seen in Figure 10). It becomes even more helpful when you’ve thought on those pain points you and your team have listed and vote on the top two or three that you want to make visible. If it’s a pain point, making it visible makes it easier for you to do something about it. I’ve found that it just takes an engaged group of dedicated team members to bring extra, much needed visibility to those items that are pain points for your team.

As you do all this, keep in mind that there is no sense in over engineering a kanban board design up front. Keep it simple. If extra granularity is needed, it will become self-evident through usage. Once you have your current work visible on the board, it’s going to change after you take it for a test drive with your team. Avoid analysis paralysis at this point. It will take some time for your board design to stabilize (two or four or six weeks, depending on the maturity of the team).

In the meantime, head on over to Section 2.2 and go catch a thief.

EXERCISES

Demand Analysis

PURPOSE: To identify the kind of work the team does and the related work problems (the team pain and business pain). These items will become inputs to the board design itself in later exercises.

Time: 30 to 60 minutes

MATERIALS:

• Markers
• Flip chart paper or a whiteboard

INSTRUCTIONS: List out the different types of work your team does. Refer to the IT Operations, Marketing, and Product Development team examples on pages 51 and 52 for ideas.

Then, list out any roadblocks preventing you and your team from finishing work. You can take a look at some examples of the team pain points on page 53.

When making your list, be specific. If your IT team’s work is late because of constant interruptions due to competing priorities, note it. If your Marketing team’s work is late because work piles up in the Design department, note it. This is your time to rant about the things you usually just mutter about. Come on, get it out.

Shining a light on these bottlenecks in your Lean kanban flow design will help make it possible for you to begin to fix the pain.

Next, list out your customer and/or business pain points. See page 55 for inspiration. Occasionally, someone in my workshops will tell me that their business executives are all really happy, and to that I want to call bullshit. No problem is a problem.

Identify Work Item Types/Categories

PURPOSE: To categorize the different kinds of work in order to support different workflows, different degrees of priorities, and applicable metrics.

Time: 20 to 30 minutes

MATERIALS:

• 3 x 3 multicolored stickies
• Markers/pens

INSTRUCTIONS: Here’s where you and your team decide on what types of work to make visible via cards that will flow across your board. Anywhere from three to seven card types is reasonable. Each card is assigned a color. If your team struggles with wanting more card types, you can create a catch-all category for tasks that have the same workflow, and use tags and icons to differentiate them. Create a legend to refer back to.

Card Design

PURPOSE: To design useful, relevant, and good-looking work items that will provide people with the necessary information about the work.

Time: 20 to 30 minutes

MATERIALS:

• 3 x 3 stickies
• Markers/pens

INSTRUCTIONS: Identify the data that you want to capture on your cards and create fields for the data. If you’re using an electronic tool, this part of the design will be done for you. If you’re using a physical board, consider what fields you’ll need to capture thievery problems.

Workflow Mapping

PURPOSE: To make work visible in order to see what is being worked on, what state the work is in, and the problems associated with potential disruptions and delays to the flow of business value.

Time: 40 to 60 minutes

MATERIALS:

• Flip chart or whiteboard
• 3x3 multicolored stickies
• Markers/pens

INSTRUCTIONS: First, ask yourself what pain points or hidden information you want to make visible. This is the fun part. Grab your team and, using a big whiteboard or flip chart (if you don’t have a whiteboard or flip chart, use stickies on a wall or window), begin with three columns: Options (Backlog), Doing, and Done. Make the Doing column wide so you can break it up into more columns if need be. Place your existing work on the board and discuss what work states you’ll want to have visibility on.

Now, let’s have a look at how to make the time thieves visible so we can do something about them.

1. List the different types of work you do (demand and where it comes from).
2. Group the items into overall categories of work.
3. Discuss which work type seems to cause the biggest problem. Why is it a source of issues?

This will be your working kanban board to use throughout Part 2 of this book.