Earlier this week, we looked at the gaps between active steps: the time when an item is ‘in progress’ but nobody is working on it.
To make those gaps visible, follow one item through its journey.
Start small.
Choose a recently completed piece of work and reconstruct what happened from the moment it started to the moment it finished.
Continue reading The hidden life of agile work: follow one item through its waitingAn item can spend days ‘in progress’ while nobody is actively working on it.
Someone has started it. Everyone involved is busy. Yet the item is waiting for an answer, a review or its turn in somebody else’s queue.
If we want to understand why delivery takes so long, we need to notice the gaps between the work.
Continue reading The hidden life of agile work: most delays happen while nobody is working on the itemA Scrum team completes an Increment. What happens next?
If the answer includes, “It waits”, the team may have uncovered a wider problem in the delivery system.
Choose a recently completed Product Backlog item (PBI) and follow its journey beyond the team.
Where did it go after it met the Definition of Done?
Continue reading Where does completed work actually wait?A Scrum team can be highly productive and still struggle to deliver value quickly.
The team may complete its Sprint Goals, maintain a healthy Product Backlog and regularly produce a usable Increment. Yet that work might then wait days or weeks before reaching the people who need it.
The problem may not be within the team. It may be the wider system around it.
Continue reading A productive team can still belong to an inefficient systemLean 5S is usually talked about in the context of factories, workplaces and production systems.
But it is also a powerful way to think about personal productivity.
At its heart, 5S is about creating an environment where useful things are easy to find, unnecessary things are removed and the system is simple enough to maintain.
That applies to a workshop. But it also applies to your home, your desk, your files, your inbox, your notes, your photos and your task manager.
Continue reading Lean 5S for personal productivity
