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The solution is to design and use a workflow system that does the following five things: Make work visible. Limit work-in-progress (WIP). Measure and manage the flow of work. Prioritize effectively (this one may be a challenge, but stay with me--I'll show you how). Make adjustments based on learnings from feedback and metrics.

Revenue-protecting work is a major target of Thief Neglected Work. Because the business is often unaware of what's involved in keeping a system secure, reliable, and functioning, revenue-generating work is considered a higher priority than intangible maintenance and sustainment work.

The five thieves of time that prevent you from getting work done include: Too Much Work-in-Progress (WIP)--Work that has started, but is not yet finished. Sometimes referred to as partially completed work. Unknown Dependencies--Something you weren't aware of that needs to happen before you can finish. Unplanned Work--Interruptions that prevent you from finishing something or from stopping at a better breaking point. Conflicting Priorities--Projects and tasks that compete with each other. This is exacerbated when you are uncertain about what the most important thing is to do. Neglected Work--Partially completed work that sits idle on the bench.

CoD boils down to three things: Reduced revenue or business value (CoD is not always about money) Increased costs The sum of the CoD of other work that is dependent on the work we are calculating CoD

Scrum and kanban can work well together. They are more alike than they are different. Differences include release cadence, roles, and the type of constraints themselves. Scrum uses a time-box (usually two weeks) to limit demand, while kanban uses the WIP limit to constrain demand.

When people describe situations in the absence of compelling evidence in order to persuade others to agree with them or take some kind of action, they're relying on their own credibility.

WIP is a leading indicator of cycle time. The more items that are worked on at the same time, the more doors open up that allow dependencies and interruptions to creep in.

We acquire more information through vision than through all the other senses combined.

queueing theory. When we look at the math, we can see why the single most important factor that affects queue size is capacity utilization. The reason we care about queue size is because the bigger the queue, the longer things take.

If everything is priority one, then nothing is a priority one, and everything takes too long. As Ross Garber says, "Many things may be important, but only one can be the most important."1 It could be that the greatest value for the business today would be for you to go help someone else finish something instead of starting something new.

Making work visible is one of the most fundamental things we can do to improve our work because the human brain is designed to find meaningful patterns and structures in what is perceived through vision.

Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox, they define Lean as, "a strategy of flow efficiency with key principles of just-in-time and visual management."

Remember, zombie projects are low-value projects that nevertheless consume time, energy, and money. Killing them helps reduce neglected work and allows you to deliver more important projects faster and with fewer interruptions.

All it takes is a shift from haphazardly saying yes to everything to deliberately saying yes to only the most important thing at that time. And to do it visually.

Think of a box of cereal sitting on a grocery store shelf. Corn flakes don't provide any value to Kellogg's until a customer buys them. Like inventory sitting on a shelf, a newly developed feature or a bug fix doesn't provide much value to the requestor until they can get their hands on it. Figure 30. Done Vs. Done Done This is where the Done Done lane comes into play. Teams who want visibility on work that has yet to provide value to someone (either a customer or internal team member) use the single Done lane to visualize "inventory" work. Work only moves to the Done Done lane once it has achieved its real goal.

Instead of going around the room, we set a policy that the board must be updated and accurate prior to 9:00 a.m. This allowed people to simply look at the board to see the latest status, and the stand-up could be spent focusing on risk and uncertainty.

I heard someone (my boss, actually) say, "Do it right the first time." I instinctively knew that wasn't right. The only time anyone does anything right the first time is when they follow directions given by someone else who has done it many times before. The first time doing anything is an experiment. And so it is with kanban. The first board design attempt is an experiment to help you discover how to improve your workflow.

When you delay the delivery of a new feature because another request got bundled in with it, there's a cost for the delay of that new feature. It could mean late feedback, less profit, or a missed sales lead opportunity.

Neglected work is another term for partially completed work. Consider a partially completed bridge. It is already expensive, but it provides zero value until it's finished.

I've experienced firsthand the power to influence decisions using metrics. I've gotten budget and headcount approvals and agreement to pursue one direction over another because of metrics.

WEIGHTED SHORTEST JOB FIRST (SWJF): A prioritization method where the job that has the shortest duration is processed before other jobs of equal value.

Becoming more predictable means we need to talk about probability and how, once we are able to shift to a more probabilistic approach, expectations around timeframes can be improved. It's all about the expectations. Setting better expectations makes leadership happy and helps make those uncomfortable stand-ups and retrospectives surprisingly fun.

There will always be unplanned work, therefore you should plan for unplanned work. Knowing the ratio of unplanned work to planned work helps you plan workload capacity.

Cycle time is the amount of elapsed time that a work item spends as work-in-progress. In addition, business value that could have been realized sooner gets delayed because of too much WIP. This is known as cost of delay. It's a concept used to communicate value and urgency--a measure of the impact of time on the outcomes we want, such as customers buying our product this month instead of next month.

Thief Too-Much-WIP is stealing time from you when: Context switching is common: When computers context switch, the state of the process currently being executed is saved so that when it is rescheduled, the state can be restored to its correct spot. Because computers perform hundreds of context switches per second, it's easy to believe that multiple tasks are performed in parallel, when in reality the central processing unit (CPU) is actually alternating or rotating between tasks at high speed.

Multitasking is a good way to screw up progress,

CAPACITY UTILIZATION: The percentage of the total possible capacity that is used. If a person has the capacity to work 10 hours a day and they work 7 hours, then their capacity utilization is 70%.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning. --Mark Twain

Knowing the ratio of unplanned work to planned work helps when planning your workload capacity. Why? Because you'll have an idea of how to set WIP limits to accommodate important, unexpected, and urgent work. If every week there is 25-50% unplanned work, then allocate 25-50% of your WIP for potential unplanned work.

Kanban Change Leadership: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement.

Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time. --Steve Uzzell

One last comment on the topic of meetings is the acknowledgment that the regular cadence of a meeting held at the same time, in the same location is extremely helpful for all involved. This relatively simple guideline reduced uncertainty for thirty-five expensive people.

Stop Starting, start finishing!

The odds of being predictable decrease when WIP constantly in-creases and flow times elongate. Remember--WIP is a measure of how many different things are being juggled at the same time. Unlike most other metrics, WIP is a leading indicator. The more WIP there is in the pipeline, the longer things take to complete, period.

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.

Little's Law to understand the math behind why WIP extends completion times. Recall that lead time equals WIP over throughput. Given WIP is the numerator of that fraction, we know that when WIP goes up, so does lead time.

One day, eBay designers decided that a bright yellow background wasn't cool anymore, so they replaced it with a white one. Customers didn't like it one bit. So many people complained that eBay rolled the change back to yellow. Then, over a period of several months, they modified the background color one shade of yellow at a time, until all the yellow was gone and had been replaced with white.1 Hardly a single user noticed. This is the power of gradual change--it gets met with less resistance as people are only asked to adapt to one small piece at a time rather than to everything all at once. Satisfy people with gradual change instead of dramatic change.

As we move from 60-80% utilization, the queue doubles. As we move from 80-90% utilization, the queue doubles again. And again from 90-95%.3 Once we get past 80% utilization, the queue size begins to increase almost exponentially, slowing things down to a grinding halt as it pushes 100% capacity utilization.

CoD has to do with two constantly changing variables: value and time. CoD asks the question, "What value is lost by the delay of something? How much will we lose if we deliver this thing twelve months later?"

Many things may be important, but only one can be the most important. --Ross Garber

Attempting to load people and resources to 100% capacity utilization creates wait times. The higher utilization, the longer the wait, especially in fields with high variability, like IT.

Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability:

LEAD TIME: A measure of the elapsed time it takes to work on a request from when it was first requested to when it was delivered to the customer.

The line of commitment is a vertical line before a specific state that signals a commitment on your part to do the work. The tasks in the backlog are options, and they may never get done. But once work passes the line of commitment, it explicitly signals that it's been prioritized and is moving forward. It is no longer an option but a fully agreed upon and prioritized piece of work.

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do. --John Carmack

Flow requires a "do not disturb" ethos.

Work-in-progress and cycle time have a relationship. High WIP means that other items sit idle, waiting for attention longer.

Context switching, which wastes time, is a major consequence of too much WIP.