What prevents you from getting work done? One of the top answers is too many meetings! Too many interruptions, meetings, and tools overburdens workers and can lead to burn out. In this post, we visit Dominica DeGrandis's advice for creating a balanced calendar to optimize your time. Too Many Meetings A calendar full of meetings leads to little time to complete actual work. We double book, triple book, and even quadruple book our time. Dominica DeGrandis describes three common types of … [Read more...]
Balanced Flowchart Exercise
By Dominica Degrandis The balanced flowchart exercise is a companion to Chapter 3.1 of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow. This exercise includes four useful metrics—all on one sheet—to help people see metric trends over time and understand how to become more predictable. TIME: 45–60 minutes PURPOSE: To discover what lead time, throughput, change failure rate (CFR), and probabilistic percentiles are by performing themby hand, and to learn what each can … [Read more...]
Making Work Visible at Parts Unlimited
By author Dominica DeGrandis. When Demand is Greater than Capacity Rarely do I use the word always, except when it comes to requests on my time. Requests always exceed my capacity to meet the demand. As I write this blog post, two other blog requests sit idle, along with two workshops to prepare for, and three books to read. They all need to be completed in the next two weeks. But, I am not alone in this regard. Surveying Parts Unlimited, one of the top replies as to why work isn’t completed on … [Read more...]
Q&A With Dominica DeGrandis and Gene Kim
Recently, Gene Kim and Dominica DeGrandis had a chance to discuss Dominica's new book, Making Work Visible. Gene Kim: What inspired you to write this book? Dominica DeGrandis: When I was a Kanban for DevOps flow consultant, I facilitated a lot of workshops to help organizations design and improve their workflow. Workshop attendees repeatedly requested a handout that they could reference during the workshops. They wanted to look at the example kanban boards and policies while doing the … [Read more...]
Get a sneak peek of “Making Work Visible” by Dominica DeGrandis
DeGrandis talks about the chronic problems we all have in knowledge work and technology work in a way that is breezy, familiar, and often irreverent, but also shows off decades of learnings and concrete techniques we can quickly adopt, both at work and at home. —Gene Kim, co-author The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook We’d like to offer you an early look at Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow by Dominica DeGrandis. In the book's foreword, Tonianne … [Read more...]
