No single right answer
All too often we focus on a single problem and make statements as if solving this one thing will solve everything. While that one thing might certainly make things better, it’s never the only answer. Everything we do is within the context of a complex adaptive system and changing any one thing will have ripple effects everywhere else in the system.
Driving to the airport
Imagine we wanted to estimate how long it would take to drive to the airport. You might see that it’s 50km to the airport and that your car can drive at 100km/hour. Therefore it will take 30 minutes, right?
WIP by Parent
One of the charts built into JiraMetrics is WIP by Parent, as shown below. What this shows is the total work in progress (WIP) on each given day. The WIP is then grouped by colour according to the parent (Epic in this case) that the original ticket belonged to.
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%.