Jira’s Start Standup Button
For a while now, I’ve been noticing a “start standup” button at the top of Jira boards and I’ve been wondering what it did. Today I pushed that button in the hope that it would do something to help make the standup more effective, and now I wish I hadn’t.
Explaining technical work in business terms
IT people are notoriously bad at explaining technology issues in business terms. So it should be no surprise when the people funding the projects don’t want to spend money on things that sound like gibberish to them. There are real product gaps that they want fixed and they have no time for “cleaning up technical debt” or “doing automation” or “upgrading framework X to version 2”.
Only one ticket per work item
We should only have one ticket on the board for any given piece of work. This should be obvious and yet I see this problem on a regular basis.
Basic Flow Metrics
Flow metrics tell us about the activity in the system; how well is the work flowing. These are often the first metrics that I consider when trying to improve a system. I start here partially because these metrics are easier to collect than many others, and because I can still make many effective decisions based on just this.
Continuous improvement
Back in the days when faxing between companies was a popular thing, I recall a client that had a workflow like this:
- Fax arrives and is printed by the fax machine
- Paper is picked up by a person and carried to the scanner where is it digitized.
- Paper is immediately shredded because there was confidential information on it.
Focus on Value
Whatever we focus on, we’ll get more of. If we focus on the flow of value then we’ll get more value. If we focus on being busy then we’ll get more of that.
Visualizing Flow Efficiency
I’m playing around with visualizing flow efficiency in my JiraMetrics tool. Flow efficiency is the percentage of time that we’re actually adding value to the work item divided by the total time. So if a ticket is open for 10 hours but in that time we only spend 2 hours actually working on it then the flow efficiency would be 2 / 10 or 20%.
Looking for improvement
I was asked recently what things I’d look at to determine if a team or group is improving and there are three main areas. In all three cases, none of these prove that improvement is happening. What they do provide is a place to me to start asking questions so that I can discover more.
High WIP invalidates prioritization
The more items we have in progress at once (WIP), the less important our initial prioritization is. When we work on one item at a time then items get done in the order we started them so we are completing them in the order of most importance.
Hybrid teams
For decades before covid, were were already using a hybrid model. We’d outsource part of our development teams to other countries, like India. We’d then have part of our teams collocated in our offices and some people calling in from that other country.