How leaders can help with limiting WIP

 In this week's episode, Dave and Peter talk about why leaders should help their teams eliminate WIP.  

 This week takeaways:

•  Understand and believe in it
• Stop starting, start finishing
• Consider the impact of what you say and when you say it

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts David Sharrock and Peter Maddison. So what's on the cards today?

Dave: 0:21

Dave. Too much work, too much work, too little work, too much work, too little time. How do we handle that ubiquitous limiting work-in-progress mantra that we all talk about but don't really necessarily get to put into place or practice?

Peter: 0:36

Clones. I think that's the answer Clones, definitely.

Dave: 0:39

Clones yes, yeah, outsourcing yeah well, yeah, that always goes so well well and and let's maybe, I think, many of many of us in in these situations. We understand it operationally, if we're on the team that's delivering it, we, we get it, but the reality is it's often the environment around us or the leadership and the expectations they place on us that make this mantra that anybody in systems thinking lean agile understands as having a hugely powerful effect on the ability to get stuff done nearly impossible to actually make happen.

Peter: 1:19

Yeah, and it is interesting as well because I mean there's, when we look at it from that perspective, I mean a lot of the things that we're talking about when we talk about limiting working process. It comes out of that lean space which comes out of manufacturing, and it comes out of this, this world, where it's very well understood. I mean it's, it's kind of logical. We understand things like theory of constraints. We understand how we need to like, uh, work at the bottleneck. We don't work anywhere else in the system because that's where work is going to be piling up and we can start to see where in the system do we have work in progress? How much stuff is there going on? This is limiting our flow through the system. So we understand that well there, but it's not always well understood from a leadership perspective and very often not well understood in knowledge work.

Dave: 2:06

I want to build on that because I think in the manufacturing context that you're discussing, it is well understood in a leadership perspective and one of the reasons is decades of experience in lean manufacturing. Potentially, but one of the things that is very specific about the environments you're describing is it's visible and tactile. You can see any workstation in some manufacturing process which is overloaded because they're still working when the bell goes. Everyone else is going. There's a pile of work still to be done. And it's tactile because when you walk around the manufacturing factory floor, whatever that might be, you can trip over the materials that are queued up and ready to go.

Dave: 2:48

So in that context, it's very much in your face. When we step into knowledge work, we have a completely different environment. When I walk up to somebody that had a laptop, or visually, we're seeing Zoom meetings with people. We don't see the impact of work in progress and, in particular, too much work in progress in anywhere close to the same way.

Peter: 3:10

Yeah, it's not as visible, it's not as easy to see and you have to in some ways go looking for it. You also run into issues in that sense of the bottleneck doesn't stay in one place. Work doesn't always pile up in the same place. We don't see it because it's going to move. There's always going to be a constraint, but it may not always remain in one place. It may move around as the nature of the work changes or as work comes in at different rates, which is much more variable than it will be in a manufacturing world where you have much more control over being able to have the flow of work into the system, have some kind of control around it.

Dave: 3:47

So where do you start looking for this? And maybe how, as a leader, do you enable a focus on limiting work in progress? What's your thoughts there?

Peter: 3:58

so I think we touched on it a little bit earlier. Um, which is one of the first things is, as the leader, actually spending time to understand and believe in this, actually realizing that, hey, I might be part of the problem, but that this, that all of this busy work, all the stuff that we're starting and never finishing, all of that stuff that's all half done, that taking cycles away, that is preventing us getting the things we really truly want to do done, and a lot of that work in progress is really hurting us when we look at the flow through the overall system. So learning some of these basic lean principles and understanding what the impact of that is on the organization is critical from a leadership perspective, because otherwise you can't walk the walk. Even if you say the words, you're not going to be able to really understand and identify it and do things about it.

Dave: 4:55

As you're describing that. I'm thinking of the many, many leadership workshops and conversations that I've had, and there are some where you've demonstrated that there's an exercise to demonstrate work in progress and to demonstrate the value of limiting it to see what impact it has on productivity, and there are lots of different exercises that you can do around this. The reason I mention it is, I think, one of the gaps that we end up having is there's a tendency and I certainly have seen that in myself of saying we'll go through this exercise whatever this exercise is.

Dave: 5:32

I mean flipping pennies game or, you know, kanban pizza. There's a number of different places that you can go and see limiting work in progress in action.

Dave: 5:42

Paper airplanes game all of these exercises and we have a tendency of sort of coming into the debrief and saying, ta-da, look what happened there. How can you possibly not believe in limiting work in progress? Now, when you're leading, you need to help your teams limit work in progress, but there's a huge gap there about belief, about not just understanding the principles and seeing through an exercise with pennies or pizza slices or paper airplanes what's going on, but buying into appreciating that this is almost a law of nature.

Peter: 6:18

And even translating it too. It's that you okay, I've seen it with pizza and plain I even if you truly believe that this is absolutely true trying to then translate that in your mind into the world that you're working in, if you, if you don't go through some exercise, so we'll now go try and identify this in your world and then help them through understanding what this might look like. Uh, that that is a critical exercise to be able to look at. Um, where do you see examples of similar things happening in your environment and what could you do about?

Dave: 6:49

that immediately educate us on limiting work in progress. One is our inbox the number of emails that we are processing and dealing with and that are hanging around or not hanging around, and the other one is our calendar and the number of meetings that we have, and as many I mean nearly. Every person not just leader, but person that you bump into in a knowledge environment has eight hours of meetings in their calendar, and how many of those are actual necessary meetings that have to be there. Or if they are, surely that speaks to a problem with overload and too many things going on at one time. Same with your mailbox. So there's a place to start immediately where we control it. It's in our immediate ability to influence that. What would you suggest? If a leader's looking at that for the first time and trying to figure out how to apply limiting work in progress to their particular environment? What can they do around the inbox? What can they do around the calendar?

Peter: 8:01

Well, I think having a rule that sends all email to trash is probably a good starting place, and cancelling or denying all incoming calendar invites that's another good place to start.

Dave: 8:14

No, but more seriously how long does that last before it changes?

Peter: 8:22

It never starts. It never starts. There's a couple of pieces that are definitely core here the calendar one, looking at and ensuring that you're blocking time, and Outlook now actually will do this, like Microsoft 365, will block, focus time for you and ensure that you get blocks of time, which are there to be able to focus, which allows you to have time to digest and do actual work. Outside of this, I mean, there's things like that will help greatly with this. More generally, looking at, well, what things do I actually need to be involved in? Where is it critical that I actually am connected into those processes or practices? How do I help? Because very often, if you're the leader, you get copied on everything and sometimes that can lead to catching something that sends you down a rabbit hole that you possibly don't need to be going down, and trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff becomes a little difficult in those worlds. So those are some things Like there's good email practices around this and a lot of different things you do, like the zero inbox.

Dave: 9:40

I feel like this is like the mythical man month and the mythical zero inbox. I've certainly been a getting things done fan for many years and I very rarely have a zero inbox, if ever.

Peter: 9:51

So yes, but no, I know that.

Dave: 9:54

What I was going to say is is I think there is one takeaway is rules around your mailbox makes so much sense? And certainly in the last, say, five years, I don't think I've ever been in a situation where understanding and making explicit rules about how the mail, how email, is used and I'm thinking here within an organization not you can't obviously control you know emails coming into you from outside of the organization, how copy is being used in terms of CC or BCC, in understanding what items are addressed within an email channel versus the many other communication channels that may be open to you, and so on.

Dave: 10:39

And we've certainly seen big changes just in that. I just speaking for myself. We've moved an awful lot of internal communication into the sort of asynchronous chat functionality that is provided by Teams and Slack and various other tools and that has seen a dramatic drop in email communications to work through. So that's already a big positive. And, yes, there's still more channel of communication. But the expectations in terms of readability, how quickly to respond what's expected there, are also articulated and explicit. So the overall impact on on flow of communication is actually to improve it, not to kind of split it up and leave you with four different devices that you're working on until 10 pm.

Peter: 11:30

Because I've also seen that happen in organizations where you and it's like, great, we moved everything into chat.

Peter: 11:35

Oh great, now I've got email and chat and SharePoint and all of these different systems, all of which I've now got to keep track of. So now I'm just even more overwhelmed with having to switch between different systems, and we sometimes we do these things to ourselves. So, but yes, I think there's a piece there around understanding. How am I going to organize the knowledge such that, when I look at the flow of information coming at me in the organization and I'm tuned into the places that I need to be, and that I'm filtering out a lot of the noise so that I'm only engaged in the places that I need to be? So they? I guess the next question from that is that once the uh, the mythical leader has managed to conquer their inbox and their calendar and got to the point where they can can deal with and start to engage more with some of these other pieces, what should they do with all of this vast amounts of free time that they now have to help deal with work in progress within the organization?

Dave: 12:34

You mean now they can go work with their teams and pour over everything that the teams are doing to get involved with whatever challenges that they have? That's what you're asking.

Peter: 12:43

Yeah, because that always makes things better right.

Dave: 12:46

Well, I mean, I think, first of all, when we're talking about things like outlook and and calendaring and inboxes, what we're really focusing on there is that role modeling piece, and part of the the deal about role modeling is a if it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you. So if I believe that you should be doing it, then I should be doing it, then I should be doing it first of all, of course. But the real piece of it is to have some recognition of how hard this is, because, of course, we can all have the best of intentions around simple things which are in our control, and the reality is it may not work out the way we need it. We'll understand that. It's a continual process of tweaking and improving what's there.

Dave: 13:30

But I think that the next piece for us to understand is our own role as a leader in violating the limiting work in process or limiting work in progress mantra, and too many times I've certainly seen from my side that I am the cause of violating the limiting work in progress kind of goal on teams that I've worked with. So I think there is a recognition there that's needed, that sort of pause or clarification over requests coming in from the leaders as to either guiding them to be shelved because this is not a request for you to do everything, let's put it over to one side or, even better, not saying anything about it and capturing it, that ourselves and using the formal channels to get work into the team, something along those lines, but recognizing our influence as a cause of many of the challenges that teams are impacted.

Peter: 14:34

Yeah, and I've definitely seen that both in leaders and occasionally in myself.

Peter: 14:39

I hope I've grown out of it, but I know that occasionally we'll all be guilty of this, where we say, oh, I've got this great idea, if we could just do this now.

Peter: 14:47

And then you go and talk to the teams and completely derail all of the really important work that they were supposed to be getting done, which now means they've got even more things to do and you haven't really helped the situation at this point. You've just created more work, and that's and this is where we're, this is what we're talking about when we're talking about this generating extra work in process by not following through the channels that we've been set up to allow the team to be able to cope with the incoming work and deal with it. And I mean there's even for the things that you could potentially say are emergencies, there should be appropriate channels or understanding of how those things should be brought in, and so there's but it's the there's definitely this piece of having this kind of seagull leadership as a term I've used her to describe for whether leader flies in and like shits all over everything yeah, but but and and I think there's a there's an element here that people have to remember.

Dave: 15:49

There are a lot of and, peter, I'm sure you and I have been in this position as well which is the intent is to maybe inform but not have any expectation on a team actually taking action, but we're not taking into consideration influence or authority or hierarchy. Influence or authority or hierarchy and there are there are incidents where where a leader just saying something will generate activity, even though there was no intent of that statement generating activity. And so that brings us onto that whole psychological safety of what can the teams do, what can the people that we are working with do? If we're a leader, how do we allow teams to push back? Are we open to very quickly not just saying, well, I'm the leader, you just have to do this, or that's just part of the job?

Dave: 16:44

But if a team comes back or if an individual comes back and says, hey, I've got, you know, eight things on the go limiting work in progress is six I'm thinking of dropping these two. Am I dropping the right two things? We have a responsibility there as a leader to first of all make it really comfortable and safe and easy for that conversation to happen, but then also to follow through and actually encourage that Maybe not just agree to two things, but take two more off the table so we can say let's give you a bit of space so that you've got room when something else comes along, and so on. So how do we facilitate that? How do we allow teams to both give feedback and feel good about it and then encourage them with the right decisions or the right advice?

Peter: 17:29

well, I think you, you were laying out some good groundwork there and how you were describing it. It's this, uh, that when people come to us with questions that were open and and we're helping them solve the problem, that they have not pushing our agenda down onto them and that we're not, uh, saying, it's my way to do these things. Not because if we, if we say that it's my way to do these things and we're always directing people into doing things in a particular style, we're saying, hey, here's my agenda, go do what I say, uh, no, you've got to do those, all of those items, and these ones as well, then it creates the wrongs type of culture within the organization. If they, if the leaders, uh, if the teams are set up and they're working through their work and the leaders are constantly coming down and saying, well, actually, this is what you should be prioritizing, stop working on that, start working on this, but exactly to your point. It also happens where the leader will just ask a question and even the very act of asking the question can generate disruption in the the work that.

Peter: 18:31

So what do you think about this? Which immediately has people going off in a different direction, or what do you think it would take to do this and then you find that they actually went off and tried to do it and you're like, well, that's not what I said and not what I asked. So so they're being very crystal clear about, like, what are the parameters under which you can take work on making that, making that agreement very clear? Having I mean, this can be done in having very strong definitions of what needs to happen is a good way of doing this. If you're looking at your flow of work and and I mean this is another part of this is encouraging this idea that you don't start work that you're not ready to start If you don't have all of the things, all of the information, all of the pieces, then don't start that work. I mean, it's a part of this. It's what are the definitions that we put at every stage of our delivery to tell us that we're ready to do the next stage, the next thing that we're going?

Dave: 19:26

to do it's. I mean it's, and that not starting something we we want to recognize the. There are a whole bunch of practices that we see around leadership and management of work. For example. There is something valuable about being able to go into a meeting with our peers or our stakeholders as a leader or a manager and saying we are working on that, even though the we are working on it is. I've just gone to the team meeting and said we really need to have a look at this. We know that we're not really working on it, and so there's that purity of communication that somehow is often lost in the sort of the back and forth of meetings and updates of progress and things like that, and that. That, that sort of transparency into what's really going on and the reality of being able to say, yeah, it's, it's not a priority. This week, this month, this quarter, no activity will be taken on. It has consequences. So how do we merge that into what we're talking about? When we talk about this, we're galloping towards the longest podcast we've ever done.

Peter: 20:32

We are, so we should wrap this up and say Sorry, wrapping it up.

Peter: 20:35

Wrapping it up, yeah, okay. So three points, because we do love to sum these up with three points, I think one is around ensuring, as a leader, you understand and believe in the principles we're talking about here, that limiting work and process will allow you to deliver more. You'll free up capacity in your system just by taking these actions and understanding why that is, so that you can apply these principles and walk the walk and show people how it's done is quite a critical part from a leadership perspective. Another piece is around the decision filter for flow, which is like stop starting and start finishing. Make sure that you're actually finishing off work, that work isn't hanging around, that you're not ending up with lots of half-done tasks in the system, because this will tie up capacity just thinking about all of that work. So make sure that you've got an understanding of that. What would you add to that?

Dave: 21:30

I think the bit that I found interesting with our conversation is the understanding of the sort of psychological pressures. Psychological is probably the wrong word, but the undercurrent pressures in terms of reporting the beginning of work or saying something without that becoming a call to action, or the interesting one of not saying something when we should probably say no, don't do that, or whatever it might be. And so there's that element which, as a leader, we need to be very, very conscious of and is not always front of mind.

Peter: 22:04

No, and and being aware aware of what the actions that may occur because of what we say, whether we intended them to or not. So with that, I think we should wrap up today, and if anybody would like to send us any feedback, they can do it. Feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom. I'm sure we'll be revisiting this topic at some point. So thank you again, dave. It's always a fun conversation.

Dave: 22:30

Thanks again, peter, always good, and until next time.

Peter: 22:33

Until next time. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.