Context switching is killing your gains (part 2)
How do we defend our team from distractions? Adhoc meetings, poorly organized team ceremonies, rework, and a host of other demands?
There are a lot of distractions out there, sapping our productivity, keeping us from gettings things done. In part 1 of this article, I talked about how badly context switching can hurt our productivity and how to recapture that lost time on a personal level.
So how do we defend our team from an influx of distractions? Adhoc meetings, poorly organized team ceremonies, rework, and a host of other demands?
Something I love about agile (as a general practice) is how successful teams benefit from it’s relentless focus on productivity. The other side of that coin is that when it’s not working, there isn’t a lot of structure to get things back on track. Agile ceremonies are supposed to keep us focused, but which ceremonies?
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Awareness is key
One of the most important things is creating an understanding of value add and non-value add work. In other words, in order to fix the problem we need to understand how bad it is… and then we can focus on solutions and make continuous improvements over time.
By value add and non-value add I mean useful effort and wasted effort. Agile ceremonies like standups and prioritized backlogs are supposed to defend value add effort — but sometimes it goes off the rails. When that happens we can use more effective, less often used, tools.
One of my favorite is a Waste Walk. It’s a structured observation of a process that identifies all the waste (activities that don’t add any value) in the process. By identifying waste and brainstorming how it can be eliminated, a Waste Walk uncovers continuous improvement opportunities and leads to efficiency.
A Waste Walk is wonderful at exposing waste. What’s more, it’s a simple activity. It wraps around your regular sprint or iteration cycle and uses very little effort.
A tiny bit of history
The Waste Walk has its roots in Lean Manufacturing. It was originally developed by Taiichi Ohno, the Chief Engineer at Toyota, as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS). While its roots are deep in the industrial automotive process, TPS itself is fundamentally an approach to agile and continuous improvement.
Taiichi Ohno defined seven types of waste (Muda, a Japanese word meaning “wasteful”), and later an 8th category was added. Many modern implementations use the acronym DOWNTIME to categorize waste:
Defect, or having to rework something, including poor designs or bugs.
Overproduction, producing more than is necessary (think about overengineering or building something the customer doesn’t value).
Waiting, any extra time when people, processes, or equipment is idle.
Non-utilized Talent, not fully applying the talents and skills of the team.
Transportation, unnecessary movement of the work product (think about moving a packaged binary through unecessary steps).
Inventory, excess work product that does not add value (have you ever maintained a server that is underutilized, or perhaps not used at all?).
Motion, movement that is unnecessary or that does not add value, including movement that is too quick or too slow.
Extra Processing, continuing to process beyond the requirements (think about optimizing processes that are not a bottleneck in the first place, or applying control processes that aren’t always necessary).
The quick and easy Waste Walk
While it sounds involved, it’s actually pretty simple — although the subtleties can be tricky.
I think the best way to do a Waste Walk is during a live sprint. While you can do it retroactively, you’ll lose fidelity and it tends to be more challenging. On the other hand, if the team does the walk “on the fly” it should take less than 10 minutes a day for each team member.
The first step is deciding how to bucket everyone’s time. This means identifying the team’s activities across the sprint, and creating simple, clear buckets where the team catalogues their time. It doesn’t need to be super detailed — actually, it should be pretty general to avoid ambiguity. Just enough detail to map to the team’s daily activities. Here’s an example:
Then, everyone classifies their time into each bucket every day, noting the time as “value add” or “non-value add.” The former means it was productive, while the latter means it was essentially unnecessary.
Coach the team on the difference between necessary and unnecessary work. Use the DOWNTIME categories as a baseline. For example, the first time we create a user story is value added, whereas going back and reworking the story because of mistakes or incomplete understanding is non-value add.
In the example diagram above, a third of the team’s work effort was being lost to non-value add activity. This is shown in the lower right, by calculating the total non-value add time versus total value add time. What’s more, the team members put in an average of 88 hours each week, effectively trying to “catch up” on the lost time with overtime. The bottom line is simply this: If all the waste can be recaptured, fully one-third of the team’s budget and time would be freed up!
In examine the outcome, we can see that the majority of lost time fell into “requirements modification & rework,” “QA flow & test validation,” and various meetings (presumably to coordinate around missed requirements).
That information is invaluable — it lets the team dig deeper, discover why so much rework is needed, and start capturing better requirements… and recapturing lost time.
Tips for a successful Waste Walk
Everyone takes part. Everyone that’s part of your organization is important. Don’t spend all of your time on the most urgent fires. Appreciate this is about preventing fires by investing everyone’s time.
Include stakeholders. You need to engage with every member outside of the normal ceremonies (like standups and planning). If they’re involved, they are part of the process.
Be observant. Establish trust so that your team brings your attention to the real issues at hand.
Be genuine. Be sure to recognizing people for doing the right thing, especially in support of continuous improvement activities.
Share. Keep repeating core concepts and praise others when you see it in practice.
Do no harm. Timing is everything. Plan in advance and don’t start your Waste Walk at crunch time or you risk making the team’s challenges more difficult.
Don’t bypass leadership. Make sure to involve leadership before implementing change to priorities, requirements, or design. This can be a huge win, too, simply be exposing gains from improvement.
Recognize this is step one. The Waste Walk gives you intelligence about where effort is being wasted. Use that intelligence to drive continuous improvemeent. Build a strategic plan to reduce the waste.