Time To Completion

expand to completion

Parkinson’s law is:

“Work expands to as to fill the time available for its completion.”

And people misconstrue it all the time.Logic plays funny tricks on our brains sometime. People somehow believe that Parkinson’s Law warns us that work will expand (or contract) to fill the time to the deadline.  So if I give you a project that will take you two weeks to do, and give you an eight week deadline, you will not complete it for eight weeks.That might be true. But it is also true that if I give you eight weeks’ work and a two-week deadline, you will complete it in two weeks.You’ll just do a really crappy job.The eight week deadline, on the other hand, gives me the option of prioritizing other work first until I need to get to your project.So, the problem here is not the gaseous nature of work – it’s that deadlines themselves are a major element for prioritization.In other words, work is a game and a major goal of the game is to get work done on-time.Sounds good.But … what if there was a different kind of game of work? What if the game of work was to continuously improve the quality and rate of delivery of your work? The game becomes ways to discover how you can work most effectively, most innovatively. The game stops being how close to an arbitrary deadline can you complete something.Then some interesting things happen.First, work becomes more predictable. You learn the rate at which you truly complete tasks. You can schedule better, promise better. You can complete better.Second, the creation of value becomes more realistically defined. Before, we considered the elements of work to be whatever was included in the contract we were satisfying. When we focus on quality, we find that tasks like making our workspace comfortable, our tools up-to-date, and our minds rested and ready-to-think are of equal weight. We find that rushing toward deadlines decreases quality and taking a few 5 minute breaks throughout the day increases quality. We find that while we can rush work out, that work tends to come back. We start to question if meeting a deadline and having revision requests come back was ever meeting the deadline to begin with.Third, you learn the real goal of estimating is to promise completion you can deliver with quality. Sometimes that takes longer, sometimes it does not. But the goal is quality, not speed.Fourth, communication with others increases. We quickly learn that working alone is working in peril. Our projects benefit from regular communication with our partners and clients. The more constant the collaboration, the more likely there will be success.Deadlines will always be a reality. We will never escape them. The goal here is not deny the existence or advocate for the abolishment of deadlines. What we want is to remove the stress and focus on the date and transfer that to the work itself. So if something is due on the 31st of December and we get it on the 1st of November, it’s finished when it is finished (November 15th) and does not wait until the deadline.So what Parkinson’s Law is really saying is that when you give people a deadline, that’s what they focus on. The game becomes the deadline. S

The Iron Chef Paradox

You have one hour. Just sixty minutes to prepare a meal for four, five courses of the highest possible quality, and with conspicuous creativity. The key ingredient comprising the meal is kept a secret until the last possible minute. While you’re used to working in a kitchen you control, surrounded by people who are trained to ensure your success, you and your team are preparing this meal in an unfamiliar location. Relatively speaking you are a novice, while the individual you are competing against is a celebrity chef of international renown for whom this type of challenge is second nature. And if these conditions aren’t stressful enough, once your meal is complete, every chef on earth will know what you’ve created, how you’ve created it, and what the judges thought.  Oh, as will millions of viewers worldwide.Your reputation hangs in the balance. Failure is not an option.

How can a chef create five dishes all at the same time with this much existential overhead? Is five not a WIP-busting number?It’s the Iron Chef Paradox.

In the book

Outliers

, Malcom Gladwell invokes the “10,000 hour rule,”  based upon the research of sociologist Anders Ericcson that suggests if you do something for 10,000 hours you become an expert. But what does it mean to be an expert?Our brains are pattern recognition devices. The more we practice something, the more we’re  able to process its intricacies efficiently and effectively. Whether it’s golf, cooking, or even empathy, practice creates proficiency.So-called “Iron Chefs” do not see five dishes in progress. They do not see a WIP-busting workload. They see one meal for one group. The meal for them is a pattern.They can see patterns foremost in the food itself. Chefs know what the current level of completeness is by sight. The food - for them - is a visual control. Simply looking at a fillet of sea bass on a grill from across the kitchen is sufficient. As it transforms from translucent to milky-white, the chef knows how close it is to done. This is known as prototype matching.  As we work through those 10,000 hours, we build up a library of pattern prototypes to recognize.Understanding prototypes allows Iron Chefs to effectively prioritize under extreme duress. You put your rack of lamb on long before you plate your ice cream. Without understanding both the time and sequence of the patterns, effective prioritization is highly unlikely.Patterns are all around us, we just need to sensitize ourselves to them. We need to be aware of what we are practicing and do it purposefully. With Personal Kanban, we have a visual control and can actually practice living. In the past, we just worked. Even though we‘ve all had a lifetime of starting and (sometimes) completing tasks, we’re often oblivious to the patterns and unaware of the prototypes of our work. Without recognizing these, without understanding how our choices impact our future, our WIP limits have been strained sending our stress levels through the roof.Chefs like Bobby Flay understand the patterns and prototypes of cooking so well, they can create dessert out of tuna.What can we  accomplish on a Saturday with a mixed backlog? What can we create with our colleagues at the office in a week? What patterns are there to help us recognize pitfalls and find success?

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Order an Iron Chef Apron here

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Complex Lives Pt 2: Visualizing Real Work

In part one of Complex Lives, we set a Future in Progress (FIP) limit for Jessica, a busy and active single mom. Her goals were overwhelming her ability to get things done. So we reigned them in by giving her a FIP limit.That was step one.Step two is visualizing that FIP. Jessica was concerned because her triathlon regimen included both repetitive and non-repetitive tasks. She needed to consume the right amount of calories, be sure to take her meds, and of course work out. This would equate to three repetitive, monotonous tickets per day in Ready –> Doing –> Done.Many tickets. Too little real information.Getting the work done for the triathlon was of course, important, but Personal Kanban is built to be an information radiator. What was the real information she needed?  This turned out to be:

1. what workouts did I do

2. when did I do them

3. did my caloric intake match the workouts

4. did I take my meds and, most important

5. am I being consistent or missing anything?

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So here we see Jessica’s board. She just had a little white board, so we worked with the walls in her home. Backlog and Done are both off the board (on the walls where the board hung). Her spontaneous tasks still work through a Ready –> Doing –> Done value stream, those tasks were color coded between work, family, studying and other tasks.  But there’s more here than that.There are two additional “swim lanes” on this board. A swim lane is another value stream or dedicated horizontal lane on our board for special tasks.The first swim lane is Triathlon Training. We have several metrics here:Diet: each day net calories, water, and meds are measured. Calories are a number, meds and water are a checkmark for done.Workout: Type, severity, and subjective well being are noted here. “20” is a 20 minute cardio. On Wednesday you can see “10 mile ride.” E,M,H are easy, medium and hard workouts. Smilies measure how Jessica subjectively felt about the workout.She can then take these metrics and not only see adherence and progress, but also plan for future workouts.The second swim lane is Jessica Studying for her Section 65 Certification. She told me that she studies by creating a study plan for herself, studying, and then testing herself on what she just did. So we set up a swim lane with a WIP of one. At any point, she can only be working on one module.So with this, we took Jessica’s overwhelming combination of things in progress and goals and made them visible and actionable. Take the time to critically look at the different projects you have in flight. In the end, you want to get the work done, but your real aim is to understand what you’re doing. To get those projects done right, Jessica needed some dedicated swim lanes.I’m willing to bet she’s not alone.

Work / Life Balance

I've been surprised lately by the number of people asking me about work/life balance. We feel we are undervaluing our family ties, our personal goals, our community involvement, our hobbies and our art. Oftentimes our work makes us feel isolated - we feel alone and seek meaning in our lives. Amusingly, we feel like we've invented this feeling.When people tell me that their generation is somehow unique in this feeling, I ask them to talk to their parents and their grandparents. Soon they discover it is merely a myth that takes just a few minutes to dispel. When your parents laugh at your hubris for an hour or so, it's quite a gut-check.Nonetheless, we can posit that we've managed to give ourselves a lot more controllable distractions than were there before. We just don't control them very well.So for this third post on Task Types, we'll do some work/life balance tasks and, like we did with work tasks, we'll establish some rules around them. Again, let's use colors.Let's say that purple represents family time. Use purple stickies and note real family time - not that trip to Costco but rather, those things that your kids will look back on and remember with a smile.Next, let's have blue represent those things that need to be done for the family. These are tasks like, "Fix the leak in the downstairs bathroom" or "Mow the Lawn."Finally, let's use green for aspirations. These are tasks like "Read the complete works of Vonnegut" or "Learn Personal Kanban" or "Get CPR Certificate."Sound good? Great! So what happens next?These colored tasks can appear on your Personal Kanban as task types. You can then set up your balance - literally. Every day you can pull one purple. Every week you can pull two blue and two green. And in your DONE column, you can see where you are with your goals.Work/life balance now has a shape and a color palette.Having said this, I consider my work and my life as indiscrete parts of a continuum. I love what I'm doing at Modus and the people I'm doing it with. So for me, the balance comes from not becoming so enamored with Modus work that I forsake all other activities.  And, yes, I do need to work on this.But, I will venture a guess that if you actively dislike what you do professionally, work/life balance will be unapproachable. You simply cannot dislike that much of your life and expect to achieve a healthy balance.Photo by Robotography

When Good Tasks Go Bad

Yesterday we were introduced to Richard, who is juggling the demands of several clients trying to keep each of them happy. His largest project entails working alone on a client's mission-critical legacy system. So in the last blog post we discussed his tasks and task types. As we discovered, outlining those task types proved invaluable to him when needing to communicate how he was working to meet his client's requests.In addition to needing to distinguish task types, Richard explained one of his biggest problems he faces is getting mired down in tasks where the solution was difficult to find. (Remember, the system he's working on is undocumented, complex and the work of several coders - so interpreting what he's reading is kind of like solving the DaVinci code every day.)Interesting work perhaps, but it can eat into your personal life when tasks routinely cause you to work late.When I asked him out of 20 tasks, how many are likely to go afield, he responded with a tentative "15."Holy moly - FIFTEEN!Needless to say, 75% of something impacts process. You can plan for 75%. 75% is not an error, it is status quo.Then I asked, "Does your client understand the miracles you are working?""Not really," was his reply.When the client doesn't understand status quo, that's also a problem.So I explained how we needed to make these issues explicit for two reasons:1. To Stop Richard from Becoming Mired Down We want to give Richard the ability to note a task as blocked, to identify the type of blockage, and to explore some options for action. (Note: the task may be blocked, right now that's miring Richard down. We want to give him permission to move around.)2. To Communicate Status on Specific Tasks We want the client know at all times, what's going on.First, we examine what the major blockage types are:

• Interaction Blockages - These tasks have begun and require help from an outside party, and

• Slogs - Tasks Richard has to slog through, alone.

So, just as we did with the task types in the previous post, a useful way to visualize these blockages is also with color.Task types were specific to, and travel with, the tasks. If these types of blockages are rare, then they would also be task-specific. But at 75% they are actually part of the workflow. They are likely events in Richard's regular working.His workflow would go from this:To this:Richard allows himself an overall WIP limit of 2. But "Stucks" get so stuck that the only way he can move forward is to do other work until something happens that will unstuck a stuck. (release a stuck?) This results in exceeding his WIP limit because incomplete tasks wind up littering his value stream.The new "stuck" columns are WIP-exempt and allow Richard to put active tasks in Coding, Testing, etc. while the stuck tasks are allowed - at least momentarily - to languish in the stuck areas.Admittedly, this is totally not a preferred way of working. If Richard were anything other than a lone actor, I would do everything in my power not to suggest this. I would be looking for ways to bring teamwork to bare to solve these stuck tasks. But historically Richard has had no team to rely on, and it serves little purpose to have him try to force solutions when they are slow to come by design.Again, with a full 3/4 of Richard's tasks being put into a holding state due to complexity or the need for additional input, that activity needs to be visualized before it can be dealt with. We need to see the procedural breakdown to refine our understanding of it and then, and only then, can we hopefully deal with it.Perhaps 70% of these stuck tasks deal with a few, identifiable areas of the system. Richard could then add up the time he's spent working with those specific areas and approach his client with a suggestion that he actually re-write those areas from scratch. As Richard did so, he could document his code and adhere to a coding standard that was higher than the one the original authors adhered to. This in turn would make the code more maintainable and, in the end, remove 70% of future blockages, saving his client money and Richard future heartache.I can't stress this point enough - the goal here is to visualize what is really happening, and then do something about it. Without the assistance of visualization in this and the previous post, neither Richard nor his client could gain clarity into the complexity of Richard's work load. Now that both he and his client have work types and are visualizing the tasks that are mired down, they can at long last make decisions that free Richard from long work hours and difficulties in estimation.Now Richard can better schedule his work time and attempt to achieve the coveted albeit elusive work / life balance. Not surprisingly, tomorrow's post will address this very topic.Photo by Steve Jurvetson