Real Flow by Brandi Olson

Author:Brandi Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Star Blazer Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

LEADING IN REALITY

The Work You Can See

(And the Work You Can’t See)

I FIND IT INCREDIBLY VALUABLE for teams to take a bird’seye view of their work from time to time. I have teams create a big chart of different categories of work in their backlog, how often they typically received this type of request in a month, where the request typically comes from, and whether they feel they can service the monthly volume without working overtime.

Recently I asked a team to do this exercise because some leaders in the organization were wondering why the team had a hard time completing their planned work. The activity revealed that only a portion of their work was being tracked. All of the support request tickets and customer service chat interactions were left out of the official data. By having the team themselves create a chart that showed the flow of their work, we got ballpark data in a short period of time.

When this team shared their visual chart with their leader, she was so excited to see this holistic picture of the team’s demand that she brought her other team leads over to show them and asked that each of them do the same thing.

The team leads were surprised to see the high volume of work represented holistically. They had been feeling that the volume of work and the overtime hours were adding up, but until they took the time to document it as a whole team, they didn’t really understand the drivers of the overwork.

I helped to aggregate and package this information across the teams and joined the team leaders in presenting the results—the percentage of teams who were struggling to service the demand and the actions the teams and team leads were taking to address the challenge. (We presented this without the team names attached to the charts because the goal was to show this as an organizational challenge, not as a way to compare teams.)

Over the course of a few months of working with this transparent view, we started to notice changes in behavior. The leaders under the department head were more active in the planning events, meeting with each team during the day to ensure they were not overloading themselves and helping with real-time prioritization decisions, as well as providing this air coverage after planning. The teams were working their action plans and getting support from leaders. Within a year, teams improved their predictability by almost 40% and felt more comfortable discussing prioritization and trade-offs.

—Marie Dingess, Agile Portfolio Lead, Capital One65

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