book

Relevant slides that sum it up: https://www.slideshare.net/ddegrandis/time-theft-how-hidden-unplanned-work-commit-the-perfect-crime-78706707

• There's 5 main thieves of time and productivity in teams
  1. Too much WIP (Work-in-progress) (too much stuff to work on, all priority #1, too much context-switching)
  2. Unknown Dependencies (e.g., across team boundaries)
  3. Unplanned Work
  4. Conflicting Priorities
  5. Neglected Work (e.g., Technical Debt)
• Indicators/Symptoms of too much WIP:
  1. Context Switching is common
  2. YOur customers wait fro long periods of time
  3. Quality Suffers
  4. Irritated Staff
  5. Someone asks you if you have 5 minutes and you say yes.
• Why do we take on more work than we have capacity for?
  1. We are team players
  2. We fear humiliation
  3. We like new and shiny
  4. We don't realize how big a request is until we start working on it
  5. We like to please people
• There are three main types of (unknown) dependencies:
  1. Architectural
  2. Expertise
  3. Activity (progress cannot be made until another activity is complete)
• Indicators/Symptoms of unknown dependencies:
  1. Coordination needs are high
  2. People are not available when you need them
  3. A change in one part of the code/outline/plan unexpectedly changes something else
• You know there are conflicting priorities when you hear people say:
  1. When will my thing be done?
  2. My thing is high priority!
  3. If my thing doesn't get done by ..., then...
• A ten minute task probably doesn't need to be tracked (in your task management software) unless one ofthe following is true:
  1. Only one person knows how to do it (Thief Unknown Dependencies)
  2. The work impacts other teams (Thief Unknown Dependencies)
  3. Someone's job primarily involves doing tasks that take fifteen minutes or less, meaning if that person's work isn't tracked, then it's available.
• Ideas to expose unknown dependencies:
  1. Use cross-functional team stand-ups to flag dependencies
  2. Identify dependencies using a dependency matrix
  3. Implement explicit rules for work flowing between different team Kanban boards.
  4. Create a rotating dependency scout role, an enterprise wide system architect who knows the system inside out.

• Cycle time: the amount of elapsed time that a work item spends as work-in-progress.
• Leads time: The amount it takes to complete a request from the time it was first requested
• Throughput: The number of things completed over a period of time
• Little's Law: Avg Cycle Time = Avg WIP / Avg Throughput

• Deliberately say yes to only the most important thing at a time.
• Kanban is Japanese for signal card

• Easy to read and digest. That being said, you can probably get away just by reading the main points at the end of each chapter.
• What the book says is not something groundbreaking. One interesting thing to keep in mind is the exercises at the end of each chapter. Maybe they can be used in meetings to identify the aforementioned thieves of time and to increase productivity
• See chapter 2.7 for a list of useful board designs to keep in mind (multilevel boards, Done vs Done Done, PDCA, Home Project