Make work visible
Make work visible
So much of modern work goes on below the surface. In a previous post, I discussed how the appearance of tech as "magic" creates a natural gap in understanding between techies and the rest of the business.
This post is the first part of a series on change, work management, and process design. As we go through the series we'll talk about how we apply some of the principles, but we're starting with a prerequisite concept at a fairly abstract level.
Make work visible
Almost all parts of every organisation rely upon digital technology to function, and therefore people who can bend the underlying technology to their will are always in high demand.
Projects, changes, initiatives, strategies, and ideas must all compete for this limited capacity to move forward. How we apportion the time and attention of our IT resources is a critical business and education decision.
"Work" is anything that takes our time and attention. Given the importance of focusing our efforts on the right work, we should have a strong desire that this choice is both informed and intentional. To make deliberate choices, we need to know what our options actually are. We need to write them down.
Work in Progress & the Parking Lot
We need a list of all the requests, ideas, changes and projects to which we could devote our energy. These aren't just the things that we plan to do, these are all the things that we might do. For now, we'll call this the "Parking Lot".
From this list, we then select the first things that we should tackle and we'll move these over to a new list called "Work In Progress". This list has a couple of rules:
Rule 1 - Only a small number of things may be on the work-in-progress list at once.
Rule 2 - Things are only added to the work-in-progress list from the parking lot.
Rule 1 is important because the work-in-progress list should contain the most important work at any point in time. If we add too many things to that list then we're failing to decide what's important and what's not. By limiting the number of things on the list we force ourselves to prioritise.
In the long run, this is much faster. Imagine trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle. Fairly easy, right? Now imagine having the same amount of space on our table, but suddenly we have two different puzzles to work on, or six. All of the pieces are going to get muddled and we'll just end up wasting time sorting them all out again. Very quickly, it's obvious that the fastest way to complete all 6 puzzles is to complete one from start to finish whilst the others are still safely in their boxes, and only move on when the current puzzle is complete and the table is clear.
Now let's take a look at rule 2: Things are only added to the work-in-progress list from the parking lot.
Before things can move from the parking lot to the work-in-progress list, we need to carry out some discovery work to define a few things about them:
What problem are we trying to solve?
Why are we trying to solve it?
What is our proposed solution?
How will we know that we have succeeded?
What are the risks and uncertainties?
We must ensure that we have a minimum set of knowledge about a piece of work as it means that we have some information to help us choose what we work on and what we don't.
When we select the things to add to our work-in-progress list, some people will inevitably disagree with our choices. As I said before, directing the time and attention of our IT resource is a critical business and education decision, so we need to make sure that there are voices for these interests involved when deciding what goes on the work-in-progress list. These conversations are informed by the answers to the questions above, so it makes sense to gather them immediately.
Unfortunately, even with the right voices on board, it won't be too long before the ground shifts beneath us and we need to change what we're working on. At this point, we need to rephrase our original concept of "make work visible" so that it's a little clearer...
For us to work on something, it must be visible.
It's fine to have to drop what we're working on to focus our resources on something more important, but we must admit that we're doing that. As soon as our emergency change or project arrives, we should:
Add it to the parking lot and carry out the basic discovery work (answer the 5 questions)
Move some other work off of the work-in-progress list, back to the parking lot (decide what we're dropping to allow us to respond to the emergency)
Add the emergency work to the work-in-progress board.
As before, our representatives from the rest of the organisation should be involved Sometimes, what initially seems to be an emergency will quickly become less urgent when we start having conversations around halting other work already in progress. When other work is paused to make way for emergency work, the rest of the organisation must know.
Summary
Let's quickly recap what we've achieved so far:
We created a list called the "Parking Lot" and this contains everything that we might work on.
We have a minimum set of information on each piece of work.
We have a list of "Work In Progress" that contains the most important work.
All areas of the organisation agree that the "Work in Progress" is the most important work.
We know immediately what to do with new work (add it to the parking lot and carry out basic discovery).
Requests for new work will not sidetrack us from the work that we've already committed to.
We can be much more efficient by limiting the work in progress, and we have organisational backing for that.
If you haven't read the wonderful novel "The Phoenix Project", then I'd strongly encourage you to do so. It's a masterpiece, and you'll finish it with a visceral understanding of this concept and several more, and thoroughly entertained.
The next post in this series will cover the capture process in detail and discuss the potential of this beyond the world of IT. Look out for it on the 24th of November!