I have recently returned from parental leave and got to experience office tempo first-hand. Was not prepared for that, but it also had me look around and I saw two teams at Avega Group that were under a lot of stress (they said) and seemed to handle a lot of tasks simultaneously.
Being dunked deeply in the Kanban-pool, it made the hair on my neck stand up and I shivered to my bones. WIP is bad you know…
Being an Avega Coach, I have some time to spend at the office, so I teamed up with Morgan, a fellow Lean/Agile coach here at Avega Group – and we decided to see if we could do anything about it.
In doing so, we had to sharpen our arguments and think a bit differently. They are not creating systems, you know. Both Morgan and I have experiences mostly with software development teams, of course. So we saw a great learning opportunity.
This has just started, but I thought I’d try to blog about the experience here.
The teams and some background
The teams we approached were the Support team and the Marketing team. The support team is a small team (3 persons) that handles a lot of the short-term activities that make an office work. But they are also involved in some bigger projects such as an upcoming conference for the whole Avega Group (350 people), and getting activities there to work. Typical tasks include managing travel arrangements, answering phone calls and the door, booking events for Elevate, and even refurnishing the office.
The marketing group is also a small team with 3 persons. Their work is made up of a lot of short marketing projects combined with some long-term stuff, such as the annual report. They have a higher degree of specialization within the group and the work is creative in character. Typical tasks range from creating presentations, designing invitations and programs for Elevate events, and creating a visual presence at conferences such as OreDev. Throughout all their work, the Avega Group brand is the most important thing.
Both teams deliver with great quality and are very accessible to anyone who needs them.
Humble approach
First and foremost, we needed to check with them if they also saw that they had problems. I had picked up some indices that they were under a lot of stress and I knew that they (both teams) handled LOADS of simultaneous work. Up to 30 small and large projects are sometimes in progress. I saw them listing it on the whiteboard, then items are delegated, and then removed from the whiteboard.
Secondly, we don’t know much about the work they’re doing. So we need to communicate to them that we don’t want to change what they do – merely the order and when.
So, we simply went up to the team leaders and asked them if they could spare us a minute or five. In character, they both answered Yes! and more or less promptly left what they were doing and followed us.
When we asked if we could help – they both were very happy. Arm-waving took place in one instance
So we set a date for a workshop – “Monday would be great. All the MD’s are away then – which means that we get a quieter day”. Hmmm – maybe something to talk about?
The goal
Our goal for them was not to increase throughput – they are already meeting the demands from the organization in both throughput and quality. Amazingly and probably not indefinitely, since the stress level will take its toll on quality at least.
Instead, we focused on a steady pace and a more acceptable stress level, and a way to handle the interruptions that will and probably should occur in their normal work.
A practical exercise – learn to count
We kicked off the workshop with a practical exercise that we hoped would give them an understanding that the more projects one focuses on at the same time, the longer all of them take.
So we asked them to write down three columns (representing 3 projects they work on) with Roman numerals I – X, A – J, and 1 – 10. To show how context switching has a bad effect on performance, we asked them to write each column with a different pen.
The first time around, we asked them to write line by line, changing pens and focus constantly. Here is my own result:
The second time (you guessed it), we asked them to write column by column, finishing the first project before moving on to the next. Here is my result doing that:
Findings
This game was a real eye-opener for the group (although one pair did the exercises in the reversed order.
- The first time, the complete exercise took (with my numbers) roughly 2.5 times longer (1.12 versus 0.28)
- The first column – the most important project – was delivered after 1.10 minutes the first time around and in 8 seconds (!!) the second time
- The quality suffered in many cases (writing the wrong letters, writing uglier, and forgetting rows) in the first exercise – while the second time around almost no one messed up (I did – if you look closely
- The general feeling was “calmer and more focused” for the second iteration.
Morgan and I were very happy with the outcome that we thought created an awareness of the problems with the “old way” of doing things.
Lean and Kanban basics
From there it was quite easy to drive the main points of Kanban (Visual workflow, Limit Work-in-process and Help work to flow) and Morgan did a great presentation on it. But we were careful not to mention too many keywords and concepts, focusing instead on the task at hand for them and how they could handle different situations.
End of part I
This blog post is getting too long already. I have posted the second part for Monday 0900. So you’ll have to wait until then to get the rest of our work.