In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dominica DeGrandis about time thieves, making work visible, the important themes from the DevOps Enterprise Summit and ways to be more productive.
Key Takeaways
- If we can understand the thieves of time better we can get some time back from our overburdened work-life
- Having too much work in progress is the mother of all the other thieves of time
- Much of our work is based on arbitrary rather than real due dates
- Most daily stand up events take too long because of the focus on status - Instead of talking about what people are doing rather talk about what’s blocking them
- Different type of works needs different time focus – managers vs makers
- The value of having a regular cadence for meetings and for “Do Not Disturb” time
- The danger, and harm, that comes about from believing there are “best” practices which can be applied in complex or complicated domains
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- 0:20 Introductions
- 0:32 Her new book - Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow
- 0:38 If we can understand the thieves of time better we can get some time back from our overburdened work-life
- 0:48 The five thieves of time are:
- Too much work in progress
- Conflicting priorities
- Unplanned work
- Unknown dependencies
- Neglected work
- 1:32 There are exercises in the book based on workshops Dominica teaches
- 2:30 One important theme of the DevOps Enterprise Summit was the business case for DevOps
- 2:52 There are a number of organisations who are sharing their ongoing experiences with adopting DevOps at the conference
- 3:16 A talk about the Balanced Calendar – the seemingly small things which end up eating into our day and taking our focus away from doing the important work
- 3:40 Using Lean Coffee and Open Space to bring attendees together to have dialog on topics which are of interest to them
- 4:50 The range of books being published by IT Revolution in the DevOps space
- 5:12 Thief Too Much WIP – when you have more demand than you have capacity to handle
- 5:38 Helping people understand the importance of saying No without fear
- 6:03 What happens when we have too much WIP and can’t say no
- 6:24 The impact of behaviours like triple-booked meetings on our calendars
- 7:15 Knowledge work is perishable
- 8:10 An example of the disfunctions that required due dates produce
- 9:58 The problem with date-driven work
- 10:15 We need to have explicit prioritization policies
- 10:34 Not everything has to have a fixed due-date – identifying a date range allows the person doing the work to manage their own time based around the requests they receive
- 10:48 Much of our work is based on arbitrary rather than real due dates
- 11:20 Quoting John Tukey – it is better to be approximately right rather than exactly wrong
- 11:51 The neglected work thief – set expectations clearly about the nature of a piece of work and why it is worth doing
- 12:48 The way extra work gets inserted into big projects because that’s the only way to get something funded
- 13:20 The way most Stand Up events are run that is counter to the intent
- 13:46 Instead of talking about what people are doing rather talk about what’s blocking them
- 14:14 Much of the time on stand ups could be saved just by making your work visible
- 14:35 Expose where work is stuck, how long it’s been waiting, how long are the queues, where are the bottlenecks in the system
- 15:18 The Paul Graham article about the difference between “maker schedules” and “manager schedules”
- 15:38 The manager schedule works in roughly one-hour blocks, the maker schedule needs half-day blocks to be able to get to the level of concentrated thought needed to be productive
- 16:14 Each schedule works well for the different type of work; the problem is when they collide
- 16:25 Because managers can dictate other peoples’ schedules they tend to work to their own type of schedule without realising the disruption this causes for the makers
- 16:55 Dominica’s talk on different calendar types and how to accommodate each other
- 17:45 The impact on people’s lives of the calendar imbalance, particularly on the makers who end up doing their best work out of hours and risk burnout
- 18:20 The value of regular cadence for meetings and “Do Not Disturb” time
- 18:42 Socialise your “Do Not Disturb” time so others know when it is
- 19:18 The story of the HP Coffee Cart being replaced with self-service and the natural flow of collaborative ideas which happened around the coffee cart disappeared
- 20:35 In the book Dominica mentions a number of “Beastly” practices – things that she sees organisations doing wrong
- 20:44 The danger, and harm, that comes about from believing there are “best” practices which can be applied in complex or complicated domains
- 21:14 There are multiple good ways to address complicated and complex problems
- 21:40 Individually named swim lanes on a Kanban board are a bad practice – the focus should be on the work, not the person
- 22:23 Another beastly practice: measuring lead time and excluding weekends
- 22:38 All metrics are based on assumptions – to question a metric, challenge the assumption
- 23:14 Ways the metrics get gamed
- 24:08 To immediately get more productive try some Interruption busters.
- 24:10 Interruption buster: Pomodoros - fixed time blocks of 30 mins to help focus on only one thing
- 25:10 In the office – put some kind of visual indicator on display so people you are in a non-interruptible state
- 25:30 Make sure to also make it visible when you can be interrupted as well
Mentioned:
- TaskTop
- Book: Making Work Visible
- Lean/Kanban/Flow Workshops
- DevOps Enterprise Summit
- Lean Coffee
- IT Revolution books
- John Tukey
- Peopleware
- Paul Graham article on Manager and Maker Schedules
- Balanced Calendar talk
- Pomodoro Technique
