#14 The Friday Digest — Work as done

Picture going to a game of cricket and not being able to see the scoreboard…

Next, imagine playing in this game, having to make decisions when your team and/or support staff have no shared understanding of the state of play…

Now, envisage the person paying for your team asking if you are likely to succeed — to win the game? I’m sure you’d be making more than a few guesses in response…

Example of visualised workflow — source unknown

• Is this team working effectively?
• Does the way they have visualised their work provide clarity or create ambiguity?
• Are they working in siloes or as a cohesive unit towards common outcomes?

My first response was “someone must fly Royal Dutch Airlines” ;)

A key element to visualising work…

Represent work as done NOT work as imagined

This succeeds regardless of methods (waterfall, agile) as visualisation allows the team & support staff (or stakeholders) to respond to the reality, making real-time decisions on where they focus.

Anyone, at any point, can then understand the display of information and translate this to something meaningful (in context).

Deal in a currency of task work?

Yep? Then the above board will not work. You cannot deploy a task nor is a task likely to add any value in isolation. Tasks = how. If operating like this, you’ll probably be asked “how do I correlate this information/activity back to the outcomes we care about”?

It’s a reasonable question that may be challenging to answer…

Visualising work as done…

Visualising the reality caters to the reality of where you are at, rather than where you would like to be in the future — which is work as imagined (or desired). It creates a platform from which you can gradually improve e.g. start to add ‘waiting for’ columns in between stages, like development, testing & deployment.

Start with the reality. Be deliberate about what you do, how and why. Make small changes, regularly.

I’ll leave you with this quote:

“The single most fundamental error of the last three decades is to try and design an idealised future state rather than working the evolutionary potential of the here and now, the adjacent possibles — it is impossible to gain consensus in the former, easier in the latter” — Dave Snowden

Example workflow board — source unknown

Let me know your view, as always.