You’re Doing Too much

On my way out the door, my wife said, “and white cheddar Cheetos.” I drew a breath, but before I could say a word, she inserted, “Oh, that’s four. I’ll send you a text.”

“Thanks,” I said. “See you in a few.”

Conflict averted. :)

After far too many years of going to the grocery store with the best of intentions and coming back one or two items shy of perfection, I recognized that I have a limitation. Of course, we all have limitations. What’s important is that we recognize and own them. Once we own them then we have a choice - Keep doing what we're doing or adjust. 

After disappointing my family with a distinct lack of snacks for the 427th time I decided I would adapt. 

Three things - That's it. 

At any given time I can mentally manage three things. That's all I can confidently hold in my brain and consistently deliver on. So, I had a conversation with my wife. "I know that you are good at keeping lists in your head, but I’m not. I'm good with three items. If it's going to be more, will you please text me?” She agreed and that has been our practice ever since.

You’re doing too much

Your team has limits as well. 

Little's law defines the relationship between Cycle Time, Work in Progress (WIP) and Throughput.

The TLDR; version of this is - The more you try to do, the longer it takes. 

Joggling

Here’s an illustration of Little’s Law.

In this case cycle time is the time to complete the race and WIP is the number of balls being juggled. Throughput would be the number of items she carries across the finish line.

Here are some questions for you to answer:

If you add one ball do you think she would go faster or slower? 

A fourth ball would make her slower and the risk of dropping increases.

If you subtract one ball do you think she would go faster or slower? 

One less ball and she’s running faster and the risk of dropping goes down as well.

Now think about your team. 

How many projects do they have in progress right now? 

If you are seeing a team struggle to finish work quickly it could be that their WIP is too high - in other words, they are juggling too much and it is slowing them down.

How do I know if WIP is too high? 

Set a WIP limit. 

Limit the amount of projects that your team may handle at one time and measure the time it takes to complete the work. Then, adjust the WIP limit until you find the optimal time. Here’s example data for the joggler.

From the data we can see that 2 balls maximizes the Balls/Time ratio, so a WIP of 2 is optimal. Of course, it’s not joggling if you aren’t juggling!

There are applications out there that can help you with this. Use a workflow management tool like Asana, Trello or Jira to track your work. Then you can use a program like Nave to analyze your cycle time and WIP data. Once you have the data, start to make adjustments to the WIP and watch the cycle time change. All that’s left is to optimize for the highest WIP to cycle time ratio.