The sound economics of making the Invisible Work Visible
Today’s post is based on the work of Dominica Degrandis and her excellent book, “Making Work Visible”.
A common problem experienced by many individuals and teams is the pressure of too much work. Specifically, that nagging feeling of the wrong kind of work crowding out the specialised, higher value work we aim to deliver. Something I see regularly when coaching teams is the time and skill wasted to repetitive, low-skilled, manual tasks that have to be done, yet are an unproductive sap on time and effort.
In this post I look at ways to address this, identifying and categorising four different types of work, how they’re related to value delivery and how to usefully visualise and prioritise them. This will aid in getting teams back on top of their work, experiencing improved value throughput and a better sense of fulfilment of using their own unique skills to deliver high value in a sustained way.
First, scope ALL the work
Consider all work done and categorise it.
Starting with what you could call, ‘visible’ work, the first category to distinguish is work delivered by the team to others that is directly provided through the application of their specific skills. If a stand-alone business, this would be the work advertised, produced and appearing on the invoices of the business. For a software application team, it's the set of features they design, write and deploy. For a research team, it's the specific research, findings and recommendations they’re uniquely skilled to provide. Let's call this type of work, Positive Value, Visible work.
Mistakes found in this delivered work and the subsequent time spent making corrections we call Negative Value, Visible work. It’s negative because it's an additional cost, and it’s visible because our customers and stakeholders can directly see the impact.
Distinguish the invisible work
The visible, positive and negative value work are two categories of work that appear in a team's backlog — they're visible and obvious. But it’s not that simple. Clearly there’s still other, undistinguished work that’s eating away at the team’s productivity.
This is the invisible work. It’s all that other stuff the team’s time and effort goes towards: work items required in order to operate and function as a business or team. This is not the work advertised or relating to the team’s unique skills, but work that has to be done nonetheless.
Because it’s ‘invisible’, crucially this type of work is given minimal thought, often not planned, estimated or solutioned for. As an afterthought the tasks are done manually, repetitively and with low efficiency.
At first this isn't a problem as small amounts of manual, repetitive work can be handled without much impact on the team’s throughput or cycle time. However, as the teams and the business grows these items of invisible work grow too, but not linearly. For every item of positive value visible work, two to four items of administrative, maintenance and other ‘invisible’ work are generated.
As this work directly contributes to value generated by the teams and business, it can be categorised positive value, invisible work.
The associated tasks of this work are a function of the team’s current architecture of ways of working — how the team is set up, how it operates and functions. In other words, how efficient its operational processes are. For a software team this is the architectural design adopted as part of its value stream workflow and the associated processes. For a research team, it's the design of the workflow processes (also a form of architecture). It’s called ‘invisible’ work as the team’s or business’s stakeholders and customers don't see it — it's not what is directly delivered or sold to them.
Negative value, invisible work — the productivity killer
If the team’s operations are thought through, designed and well executed this results in efficient operation and a sustainable work pace for team members. However if neglected and overlooked where teams don't consciously design how they operate and fail to keep on top of this type of ‘invisible’ work - chiefly because it is arduous, manual and repetitive - then the team will accrue debt in the form of technical debt. Neglecting this invisible work for long enough eventually leads to the teams becoming so clogged up in tech debt inefficiencies that they’re unable to deliver in a timely and effective manner. A tell-tale indicator of this symptom is rising lead-times for the same item of output.
This scenario is known as Negative Value, Invisible work and is the primary killer of productivity for teams and businesses.
2x2 grid of the four work types. Source: Dominica Degrandis, 'Making Work Visible’
Make it all visible
Given these four categories of work, let's look at how they can be assessed and prioritised:
What if we knew the proportion of time and effort taken for each work type?
What actual proportion of team time and effort is spent on Positive Value, Visible work — the work of actual value outcomes, verses time spent on repetitive, manual work — the negative value, invisible work due to poor architecture?
Having visibility of this data allows the team to correctly prioritise their time and effort by taking into account and going after the areas of technical debt.
An approach
1./ Review with the team their work backlog, surfacing all the work including the work until now not distinguished — the ‘invisible’ work
2./ Split out and categorise the items of work into buckets of the four work types - eg, Feature, Bug, Architecture, Tech Debt
3./ Recreate the team backlog, breaking it into four corresponding sub-backlogs. This will get recombined back to one backlog later
4./ Compare the work-type sub-backlogs against each other by effort. The team can now see at a glance where their effort and time is really being spent
5./ Take a note of how much of the manual, repetitive process work is associated with paying down/managing tech debt. Expect it to be at least 50% of the total team work effort and trending upwards over time
6./ Of the Tech Debt work (invisible, negative), stack rank them in order of size, starting with the big hitters, those big time wasters.
7./ Allocate time for the team to design new ways of automation of these big, time waster work items or outsource them to AI tools.
The newly defined work from these exercises by the teams will create new ways of working value streams, classified as positive value, invisible work. This is investment by the team to pay off its debt and, in time remove the manual, repetitive ‘busy' work to zero.
With this categorised management of all types of work, more and more of the team’s capacity and effort can be focused towards the positive value, visible work — work we can deliver as value outcomes for our customers and stakeholders while leveraging the team’s unique and valuable skills.