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...]
Providing Visibility over Multiple Work Management Systems
Adapted from the DevOps Enterprise Forum Guidance Paper Overcoming Inefficiencies in Multiple Work Management Systems by Scott Prugh, Dominica DeGrandis, Rosaline Radcliffe, Pat Birkeland, and Keanen Wold. Large enterprises are traditionally organized by function and managed to optimize vertically for specific outcomes. In IT, this often means organizations specialize in functions such as design, development, QA, and operations. Many decisions are made in the context of those functional … [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...]
Why the Full Stack Engineer Is Problematic
Excerpt from the DevOps Enterprise Forum Paper Full Stack Teams, Not Engineers, by Jason Cox, Christian Posta, Cornelia Davis, Dominica Degrandis, Jim Stoneham, and Thomas A. Limoncelli. Can you possibly be good at everything? In the digital era, the sheer quantity of tools, frameworks, programming languages, and methods/models overwhelms the brain. Technologies come and go, and learning a new technology often involves intense effort. Learning a new environment and domain knowledge … [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...]
