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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.

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.

Part of the Agile Manifesto mentions "Customer Collaboration". I fully support that notion that our work should involve close collaboration with the customer. However, to me, collaboration means speaking the language of the customer. And that language should extend to cover all the metrics and analytics that we use. Have you ever had to explain what a Story Point is to a customer? How about Velocity? If you do not like yourself very much, march into your CFO's office someday and try to explain what a Story Point is. However, I guarantee all of your stakeholders understand the concept of elapsed time. I guarantee they understand the concept of the total number of features to be delivered in a release. If we truly want to be Agile, we are going to have to adopt the language of our customers. To that end, we must choose words and concepts that they are comfortable with--not force them to learn a new, arbitrary, and unhelpful vocabulary.

the Three Ways," he says. "The First Way helps us understand how to create fast flow of work as it moves from Development into it Operations, because that's what's between the business and the customer. The Second Way shows us how to shorten and amplify feedback loops, so we can fix quality at the source and avoid rework. And the Third Way shows us how to create a culture that simultaneously fosters experimentation, learning from failure, and understanding that repetition and practice are the prerequisites to mastery."

I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. How can we manage production if we don't know what the demand, priorities, status of work in process, and resource availability are? Suddenly, I'm kicking myself that I didn't ask these questions on my first day.

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.

"spike" I mean a work item--user story--that is used to drive out risk and uncertainty in another work item).

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.

The direct consequence of elongated Cycle Times is a decrease in Throughput. Throughput is the metric that represents how much work completes per unit of time. A decrease in Throughput therefore means that less work is getting done. The less work that gets done, the less value we deliver.

"There are five focusing steps which Sensei Goldratt describes in The Goal: Step 1 is to identify the constraint. You've done that, so congratulations. Keep challenging yourself to really make sure that's your organizational constraint, because if you're wrong, nothing you do will matter. Remember, any improvement not made at the constraint is just an illusion, yes? "Step 2 is to exploit the constraint," he continues. "In other words, make sure that the constraint is not allowed to waste any time. Ever. It should never be waiting on any other resource for anything, and it should always be working on the highest priority commitment the it Operations organization has made to the rest of the enterprise. Always."

"Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.

If work flows only part way through the system and gets kicked out or discarded--for whatever reason--then any effort that was expended on the eliminated item immediately becomes waste.

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.

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.

Ideally, our kanban board will span the entire value stream, defining work as completed only when it reaches the right side of the board (figure 6). Work is not done when Development completes the implementation of a feature--rather, it is only done when our application is running successfully in production, delivering value to the customer.

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.

WIP: All discrete units of customer value that have entered a given process but have not exited.

"Yes, I think I can," I say. "At the plant, I gave you one category, which was business projects, like Phoenix," I say. "Later, I realized that I didn't mention internal it projects. A week after that, I realized that changes are another category of work. But it was only after the Phoenix fiasco that I saw the last one, because of how it prevented all other work from getting completed, and that's the last category, isn't it? Firefighting. Unplanned work."

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.

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.

The actionable intervention suggested by a CFD that looks like Figure 5.5 is that we must get arrivals to match departures.

there are five assumptions necessary for Little's Law to work, they are: The average input or Arrival Rate (l) should equal the average Throughput (Departure Rate). All work that is started will eventually be completed and exit the system. The amount of WIP should be roughly the same at the beginning and at the end of the time interval chosen for the calculation. The average age of the WIP is neither increasing nor decreasing. Cycle Time, WIP, and Throughput must all be measured using consistent units.

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%.

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.

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.

"You probably don't even see when work is committed to your organization. And if you can't see it, you can't manage it--let alone organize it, sequence it, and have any assurance that your resources can complete

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.

The arrivals column acts as the throttle by which we constrain the amount of work that can arrive to our system at any given time. It is the mechanism by which we match the rate of arrivals in our process to the rate of departures. The matching of these rates is what is going to yield process predictability. And, The arrivals column acts as our "commitment" point to start new work. The implication being that when new work is committed to, we expect it will flow completely through the process and depart the system. It is only when work departs our system that customer value can truly be recognized and our predictability be assessed.

"We were busy reducing costs that didn't have any impact on reducing operating expenses." "Correct," Lou continues. "But the important thing is that we, in our plant, have switched to regard throughput as the most important measurement. Improvement for us is not so much to reduce costs but to increase throughput."

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.

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.