A Closer Look At The First Way
Summary
We begin our closer look at the ThreeWays by first focusing on thefirst way.Weneed to bevisible in our work to achieve success, but what does this meanand how do we do it?
A Closer Look At The First Way
In this post we start our zoom in on the Three Ways by first looking at the first way. Being visible in our work is an important first step towards success and there are a few ways to do this. Most of all, this is about making our work visible to all other departments and allowing a system of shared experiences and forward flow of work. The first way is transparency.
Being visible
The technology value stream has a problem with visibility. Technology work is done at the click of a mouse and isn’t visible in the way physical work is. But to limit the passing downstream of work with incomplete information or mistakes in information, we have to make the process more visible. If we don’t do this we end up with failures in our applications and late deliveries to customers. The best way of doing this is by using visible, shared workboards. This allows us to document our work on visible work cards that everyone can see and access. Work is placed in work centres and moved along from ‘in production ’to‘ done’. This achieves more than making our work visible, it also makes it easier for us to manage our own work flow.
Limit waiting work
The work we have ‘in process’ is often holding up other work or effectively rendering us immobile. In technology we may be receiving urgent work constantly though emails, calls, systems and management, and this can cause us to mark lots of varying work as ’in process’ A normal practice of interrupting technology workers may prevail because this isn’t really seen as a problem. If we interrupt physical workers we can actually see the effects this has on them, but interruptions to technology workers is invisible. To remedy all this we can limit our waiting work and if we use shared boards to make our work visible we can see which tasks are in process and which are done. We should limit the amount of work in process and only allow more work to appear in this column once other tasks are moved to ‘done’. We need to finish work before we can start more work.
Small batch sizes
If we go back to our principle of detecting problems early and fixing them by being visible, we can see why small batch sizes work better than large. If we work on a large batch and create a load of our particular work in one go, it might seem like we are being productive, but we are actually potentially slowing the entire system down. If there is an error in our large batch once this is detected we have already produced a lot of work with that same error present, whereas if we work on small batches we can easily fix the problem before we create more. Large batch sizes also creates a lot of waiting work, which slows down our lead times.