Read the previous article, The Power of Cycle Time to understand what a cycle time is and how to measure it. This article is about what to do once you are taking the cycle time measurements and want to improve it.
Here are some recommendations about ways you can speed up the cycle time of items. Keep in mind there is no “the recommendation.” The context, the current way work is performed, the type of work… there are many variables that would change any real recommendations about what to do about excess cycle times. Approach this sort of problem with a spirit of experimentation. Change how you work, and see how cycle time responds.
Silos
The primary cause of slowdowns are silos. When there is a group that does activity A, and another group that does activity B, the work A hands to B usually goes in a pile where work from A, C, D, and E also goes. Since B isn’t using the same priorities as these other groups, their work stays in a queue and doesn’t move. Addressing queues caused by silos can be done by:
- Creating cross-functional teams. People in B join group A and they only work on A’s work. Now there is only group A, and the queue is far reduced.
- Collaborative work. If people who do activity A and B work together at the same time, there is no handoff. They are literally co-working at the same time. Collaborative work is not A does a thing and then shows it to B. It is working on it literally together at the same time. Silos can exist inside of teams, and this can cause queues to form between team members.
- Dedicated bandwidth. People in B are dedicated to work from A for some part of their work day. This can help to minimize the effect of handoffs.
- Process Embellishments. Any formality of process designed to help us measure things or prevent mistakes end up being the red tape that slows everyone down. Find all of these wasteful approvals, controls, reviews, and remove as many as you can.
- Address the queueing problem in B. Find out what causes B to be so far behind all of the time and fix that problem. It is likely to be a cycle time problem that puts you in a recursive investigation just like this one.
Large Batch Processing
Any time work is collected together into a large batch, it becomes complex and increases just about everything that can go wrong. Specifically look out for:
- Long range plans. A plan that reaches out more than a couple of weeks is a large batch of work. If scope is collected together as many requirements that must all certainly be delivered, you have created complexity through the interconnectedness of work and have a single large batch plan. This will naturally result in large batch scope, large batch work. Large batch testing. Large batch delivery. Finally, large batch risk and large batch high-impact failure is possible. Make a vague roadmap of the future. Create plans on the fly in small, iterative, incremental ways to avoid large batches of work.
- Fixed Scope. Big Requirements Up Front are a form of the waste of gold-plating. In product development, we know that uncertainty is an inescapable truth with which we must contend. Reduce scope into small units and deliver them as you go. Decide whether or not the returns are diminishing as you deliver less and less important work, and stop when the math no longer makes sense.
Work-In-Process
The more we work on, the less we get done. Investigate whether or not there are too many things going on at once. This can happen at multiple levels. Your organization could have too many goals at once. There could be too many products interacting together at once. There could be too many projects. Or it could be as simple as one person working on too many things at a time. Limit work-in-process (WIP) to get more done more quickly.
Stop starting and start finishing.
Remove Waste
Anywhere in the path of work, remove that which is not valuable. If it doesn’t directly result in quality work delivery, remove it. Consider the difference between the actual work and the meta-work. Meta work is email, messages, status reports, having to explain oneself, dealing with interruptions like training and company cheering sessions, approvals, creating tickets and logging official intake requests, filling out forms, presenting things formally.
Think like a customer. When you buy a thing, it has a price. What are you willing pay someone to do that contributes to the increase in that price. Consider your car. You paid for it. You paid for it to be put together, painted, and road-tested. You paid for it to be delivered to the dealership. Should you have to pay for it to be washed repeatedly to keep it clean so you will buy it? Should you have to pay for the car salesmen to attend a rally? Do you want to pay for the mechanics to fill out a weekly report on repairs? Do you want to pay for everyone to stop working while an executive from HQ tours the place?
If you don’t want to pay for it as a customer, remove it from your own process if you can.
There are three kinds of waste: obvious waste you can remove, impossible to remove activities that have to exist even though they are wasteful, and the things that look impossible but are really political. That third kind is where leaders can support their people.
Empowerment
Top-down leadership styles, aka leader-follower models, are notorious for slowing down completion of work. Very few people bring their best to a “telling not supporting” leadership model. Empowered people are able to limit WIP. Empowered people are able to use small batch processing. Empowered people can work across silos and design cross-functional processes that make sense. It is top-down control systems that create these obstacles. I believe it is imperative that we, as leaders, ask ourselves, “Am I the problem?”
“When looking for the cause of any problem your people encounter as a manager, start in increasing concentric circles beginning with your own desk.”
Mark horstman
Dopamine Hits vs. Valuable Leadership
As leaders, the most fun we can have is to step into the job below us. The work is smaller. It is easier to do. We can direct other people’s actions and with the great power we have to move many others to do things, we can accomplish a lot. It feels powerful. It feels great! It has huge rewards. But it is the wrong work for us to be doing. Doing that denies others the chance to step forward and learn to solve problems. By making ourselves the solver of all challenges, we also make ourselves the bottleneck.
The real job of leaders is to step away from the day to day work that is happening and allow others to learn to solve their own problems. Instead, we should be stand ready to do the really hard work: removing the many obstacles to flow that we have placed in the system ourselves thinking we were preventing future problems or organizing everyone in an efficient manner.
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Reinertsen, D. G. (2009). The principles of product development flow: Second generation lean product development. Celeritas Publishing.
Willink, J., & Babin, L. (2015). Extreme ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs lead and win. St. Martin’s Press.