Dominica DeGrandis, author of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow and Principal Flow Advisor at Tasktop, helps organizations make work visible to improve the flow of work across value streams. Enabling Systemic Change Want to know how well your organization can adapt to change? Look at your data. I’m a firm believer that the data you choose to analyze—and the data you choose to ignore—are crucial indicators of an organization’s capacity for a successful … [Read more...]
The Case Against Best Practices
To the disgruntlement of some people, I have been skeptical of best practices since I was first exposed to the idea. But now more than ever, I fear that teams strive to implement and follow best practices in situations where novel ideas are needed instead. The assumption that published works are the correct approach to take is an interesting topic. I acknowledge the irony of this statement given I have suggested practices and guidance in my book. It’s just that people seem to read things and … [Read more...]
Doing it All is Not a Good Strategy
Product teams in the midst of change at one of the biggest US insurance companies came up with an experiment they called “Doing it All.” The sarcastic title was intentional, as it magnificently described the nature of a theme that I observe across multiple industries. From finance to insurance to transportation, carving out capacity for you and your teams to implement a new way of working requires herculean efforts. Change takes time. It’s not enough to just give teams approval to do something. … [Read more...]
The Five Time Thieves
If your wallet was stolen, you’d notice. If your security badge to your office was filched, you’d know it when you arrived. And if you opened the fridge to find your lunch missing, you’d make sure your office mates heard about it. So why don’t people notice when they are robbed of something more valuable than their wallet, badge, or lunch—their nonrenewable time? We grumble that there just aren’t enough hours in the day and that someone else sure seems to have a lot of free time. But we regular … [Read more...]
Announcing Immersion Courses: An On-Demand Learning Experience
Since the publication of The Phoenix Project in 2013, IT Revolution has been dedicated to helping improve the lives of technology workers around the world. We've worked to spread the word on best practices in DevOps through the ongoing publication of books and papers. We've invited the top thought-leaders and practitioners from across industries to present their learning at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. We've brought business leaders from inside and outside the tech world to share the leadership … [Read more...]
Optimize Your Time with The Balanced Calendar
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...]
