Make Work Visible

Find all hidden work to see why your time is disappearing. ​One of my passions / favorite things is finding ways to bring Agile into my everyday life to make things more effective and allow myself more time and freedom to do the things I want / to make the most of my days. I have recently started reading the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I have been enjoying the book immensely and one of the things that has really stood out to me is how much crossover there is between many of Marie Kondo's strategies and philosophies and those of Lean and Agile. One of the first parts of the books talks about why she tidies items by category and not by location and it reminded me a lot of what Lean and Agile try to accomplish by making work visual. According to Kondo, you need to organize by category (clothes, books, etc) instead of by room so that you can see exactly how much of each category you have. If you organize by room, you may not identify all of the clothes and you will always need to reorganize. The same goes for work within a team, 

Types of Work

In the novel, The Phoenix Project, the characters identify four key types of work:

• Business Projects: Projects around delivering direct customer value.
• Internal (IT) Projects: Infrastructure and operations projects, internal improvements. The production line for delivering the above business projects.
• Changes: Fixed, changes, improvements generated by the two above.
• Unplanned Work: Incidents, fixing problems in the three previous types of work. Unplanned work can significantly reduce the amount of time available for planned work.

Always Visualize / Identify

You always hear those comments around (i was also doing this, so and so asked me to do something real quick, etc). all that stuff takes up valuable time and if it is not visible the teams estimation and projections and ability to deliver will be impacted and people won't understand why. Visualizing all work makes it very concrete where the team's time is going and the impact to other items 

​Prioritize and Remove

are the teams focusing on rocks or sand? knowing all the work in progress would you still keep working on what you are doing? 

Swarming and Self Organization

Everyone wants to help but its hard to know how to help sometimes. If work is easily visible teams can self select what they feel they can help with and self organize more effectively. 

Final Thoughts

​Helps with transparency and self organization
-people can see what there is to do
-will help focus on critical items
-separate sand vs rocks

Do you often wonder where your time has been going? How do you identify invisible work?