Visualizing the Impacts of Conflicting Priorities

Are conflicting priorities stealing time away from you? Do important decisions get delayed in your organization because of rescheduled meetings? If people are unavailable when they are needed, competing priorities across teams may be the problem. Your team’s top priority is likely not the other team’s top priority.
Complex problems that prevent your team from delivering business value predictably can be improved by visualizing the impacts of conflicting priorities - in both your workflow and your metrics. In this talk, Dominica shows you how to improve your DevOps implementation and influence others by using the power of visualization.

Transcript

1. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Visualizing the Impacts of Conflicting Priorities
2. ddegrandis.com @dominicad
3. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Traditional Work Management Visual
4. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Teams rarely work in isolation 1 2 3 How does Courtney visualize & prioritize tasks across multiple projects?
5. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Concurrent projects compete for the same experts & specialists If Dev in tool A & Ops in tool B, how do they communicate & track work states? pressure to standardize on tools
6. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Team A’s top priority is not team B’s top priority
7. ddegrandis.com @dominicad @dominicad https://itrevolution.com/book/the-cornerstone-for-winning/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qav1y7G15JQ Why Conflicting Priorities matter PPl Unavailable à bottlenecks
8. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Value Stream - the activities done from beginning to end for a specific product or service in order to provide business value. Continuous smooth & fast FLOW of customer value makes for happy customers. Flow: Business value pulled through a value stream smoothly and predictably.
9. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Dominica DeGrandis Thief Too much Work-in-progress (WIP) High WIP means that other items sit waiting for service longer. The single most important factor that affects queue size is capacity utilization.
10. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Dominica DeGrandis Thief Too much Work-in-progress (WIP) Allows us to quantify relationship between wait times and capacity utilization. Wait times increase dramatically as utilization approaches 100%. Queuing Theory: Applied statistics that studies waiting lines If the goal is speed, consider managing work by queues.
11. ddegrandis.com @dominicad A canceled meeting creates rework – which has a cost • Can’t be in 3 places at 1 time. • If no-show person disagrees w/ decision made, then rework occurs to rehash decision. • When the right brains aren’t at the meeting, decisions get delayed. • What’s the cost of delay to your biz? The triple booked wham
12. ddegrandis.com @dominicad A decision to do one thing is a decision to delay something else High WIP blocks FLOW
13. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Pull system provokes prioritization convos
14. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Dominica DeGrandis Thief Conflicting Priorities Projects and tasks that compete with each other. Conflicting Priorities is a time thief b/c people take on too much WIP when priorities are unclear. Work Management Visual – Kanban
15. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Beastly Practice – Individually named swimlanes
16. ddegrandis.com @dominicad A3 problem solving approach: Learn, study, & gain agreement 11 x 17 inch paper Taiichi Ohno
17. ddegrandis.com @dominicad When duration and delay costs are different, base priority on delay cost divided by duration. http://reinertsenassociates.com/books/
18. ddegrandis.com @dominicad https://www.agileconnection.com/article/rowing-same-direction-use-value-streams-align-work What if the goal is time to market? ROI doesn’t take time or risk into consideration and might not include internal processes that do.
19. ddegrandis.com @dominicad https://www.agileconnection.com/article/rowing-same-direction-use-value-streams-align-work Cost of Delay Quantify the cost of the work if it gets delayed.
20. ddegrandis.com @dominicad David McCandless InformationisBeautiful.net https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/what-makes-a-good-data-visualization/ What makes a good visual The power of visualization. integrity interesting utility beauty
21. ddegrandis.com @dominicad A quick glance returns a meaningful message Philippe Kruchten, What Colour is Your Backlog https://pkruchten.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/kruchten-110707-what-colours-is-your-backlog-2up.pdf
22. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Beware the Red Yellow Green (RYG) Report “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” ~ Jim Barksdale
23. ddegrandis.com @dominicad MATERIALS: § Blank balanced flowchart § Data spreadsheet Show me the data 1 metric trend in 4 areas: • How fast • How productive • How good • How predictable See impacts of change in 1 metric by showing all 4 metrics on 1 chart. Inspired by Troy Magennis & Larry Maccherone, “Doing Team Metrics Right,” http://focusedobjective.com/team-metrics-right/
24. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Look at Flow time 1/4 Balanced Flow chart exercise – How Fast? Influence others using the power of visualization
25. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Look at Throughput 2/4 Balanced Flow chart exercise – How productive? What we’re measuring impacts people b/c people value what is measured.
26. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Look at Quality change failure rate (CFR) # of FD done items # of total done items 3/4 Balanced Flow chart exercise – How good?
27. ddegrandis.com @dominicad If you want to be more predictable, look at probability. percentile to discuss the probability of finishing work within so many days. 90th percentile filtered on business requests 4/4 Balanced Flow chart exercise – How predictable?
28. ddegrandis.com @dominicad The Flaw of Averages: Why we Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty By Sam L. Savage with illustrations by Jeff Danzinger http://flawofaverages.com Plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average
29. ddegrandis.com @dominicad “Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil…. It’s about priorities and fiercely protecting your time.” ~Margarita Tarakovsky
30. ddegrandis.com @dominicad “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.” ~Warren Buffett https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/756.Warren_Buffett
31. ddegrandis.com @dominicad Email: dominica@SendYourSlides.com Subject: flow To receive: • copy of this presentation deck • Videos of my talks • 73 pg excerpt of Making Work Visible • 45 min excerpt of Making Work Visible audiobook • Balanced Flow Chart exercise • Tasktop article on tool integration • Forrester article: Agile-Plus-DevOps With Value Stream Management