Learn to Say "Not Right Now" and Focus
How reducing their Work In Progress helped the Fox Squad double their throughput
Hey, my name is Tristan Hood and I love helping leaders and teams find new and better ways of managing work. I believe continual, organic change is far superior to large transformation, unless absolutely necessary of course. As such, I created this blog with the intent to share my experiences, wins, and losses. Today we discuss Kanban Practice 2, Limiting Work In Progress, in our 6 part series.
I remember someone telling me once that when we say yes to one thing we are saying no to something else. In other words, if I say yes I will take my wife out on a date, something she would say is the correct thing to say yes to, I am also saying no to all the possible things that I could have otherwise done with that time, like apologize profusely for not taking her out on a date.
I have a confession.
As a human that resides on this giant blue marble, I struggle setting the correct boundaries and knowing when to say no to things. Let’s call it an unhealthy relationship with the word Busy. I love being busy. I crave it. For some, it means, “I’m needed.” For others it means, “I’m loved, I’m appreciated.” For some, it means “I’m talented and smart.”
For me, I just want people to like me.
That’s right. I said it. My association with busy boils right down to always wanting to say yes when people ask me for things simply because it makes me feel like people will like me. It’s a strong desire. What’s worse is, I have on occasion allowed this desire for others to like me cause me to say yes to something that caused me to have to say no to, for example, saying yes to taking my wife out for date night. There is nothing worse than making my wife feel like I value the impression of others ahead of my relationship with her.
Saying Yes At Work
This happens just as much at work as it does in my personal life. I say yes to that last minute work request because I want my team to like me. The difference at work is that I’m not married to anyone on my team. No offense to my team, as I am sure they are all probably great catches. But there are drawbacks to saying yes to everything and trying to juggle every request that comes my way. The biggest issue is that, if I have four or five things I am juggling and it’s time for me to do the things I really should be doing, I’m always busy.
The reverse is also true. When I am ready to post a new blog or launch a new training and I need someone on my team to review or add value to that work, if they have said yes to a bunch of work themselves, what are the chances they will be available? Even if they said yes anyway, they would be stopping the work they were doing and quite possibly losing the context. They would now have to start it all over again. Brendan Wovchko says it this way, “Interruption is a two hour journey in a new direction, and a two hour journey back.” Translated, that means when we are interrupted, we can normally count on spending about two hours on the thing that interrupted us, and then about two hours trying to remember the context of where we were on the work that got interrupted.
What Can We Do?
The way we combat saying yes to starting everything is by setting some healthy limits on our work in progress. We call these WIP limits for short. It’s one of the easiest things you can do as an individual or a team. Let me share a quick story with you and then we can talk about a simple strategy for how you can start setting some limits for yourself.
Josh & His Foxes
While I was coaching at Ramsey Solutions, a good friend of mine, Josh Campbell, came to me and asked if I could coach his team through setting WIP Limits. His team was struggling to deliver work and they felt overwhelmed. Their busiest season was right around the corner and, on the current trajectory, they felt there was little hope for meeting some of their more ambitious goals.
As Josh explained the problem, he mentioned there always seemed to be too much work going at any given time. They loved being busy it seemed. They had said yes to way to many items and, while he couldn’t quite articulate why, he had a feeling this was causing the massive delays the team were experiencing.
The first thing we needed to do was understand where they were. We looked at the team’s metrics for the previous few months - three months is a great block of time to use as a solid reference, by the way - and we found that the team was averaging a weekly throughput of 7 items. That means the team was finishing an average of 7 work items each week. Then we looked at how many items they had in progress, on average, per day. They had an average of 20 items in flight per day over that same period. That’s 20 items of work being juggled by a team of 8 people just to get 7 items done per week. Imagine the interruptions!
It reminded me of something Cole Smith, a fellow Agile coach, always asks when working with teams struggling to deliver. He asks, “Would you rather start 20 things and finish 2? Or would you rather start five and finish five.”
The team decided, after some great discussion, to set the limit for work in progress at 7. Some of the team was skeptical. A few of them thought they’d never get anything done or, worse, some of them would have to sit around with nothing to do. Either way, they all committed to try it for a week.
Long story short, as the team spent that week together collaborating and constrained by the low WIP limit something interesting happened. After one week, the team’s throughput not only rose, it doubled! In one week they went from finishing seven items per week to finishing 14 items. And then they did it again the next week. The team started consistently delivering. Even more impressive, they managed to drop the average cycle time for work from around ten days per work item to around three days per work item.
Landing The Plane
Here are a few tips for how you and your team can set some work in progress limits immediately.
Step 1: Get together as a team and ask each person, “How many things can you handle working on at a given time before you start to get frustrated?” You’ll be surprised at some of the answers and learn some things along the way.
Step 2: Consider how many people you have on your team performing a specific activity. For instance, how many developers are on your team, or how many writers. This will help you decide, as a team, how many of those kind of items to have in progress at any given time.
Step 3: For every “In Progress” activity on your Kanban board, set a limit. Just get started and improve it regularly. There is no perfect number.
Step 4: Consider your teams connection to accomplishment and motivation. A good rule of thumb is, if the team is overwhelmed, do less work. If the team is feeling underutilized, start more work. Set the WIP limits to support this.
Note: Keep in mind the different types of personalities and roles. People with more engineering backgrounds typically like to focus on one thing at a time until they figure it out while creatives like to have two or three things they bounce around between. As a creative, I know this is true. For me, it keeps things from getting boring. When I hit a block, I can just start something new and I get a jolt of dopamine. I have to be careful, though, not to get addicted to starting. Thus the WIP Limits.
And that should get you started on your journey to setting healthy boundaries around saying yes to things. FYI, if you’re married, make sure you are routinely saying yes to date nights. You’ll thank me later.
Until next time,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.