The Four Conclusions of an Idea
Not every idea is treated equally. We decide some aren’t appropriate to start right now, some will never be started, and some we start. Although it’s unfortunate, not every team finishes what it starts. Mature teams gain a clear understanding of these behaviors and evolve their decision-making to be less wasteful.
Kanban identifies four potential end-states an idea can achieve. Some are more wasteful than others.
For many knowledge work teams, ideas are often discarded before they are ever started. Discard is the ideal end-state. On a healthy team, of all the ideas a team conceives, a vast majority of them will be discarded. This behavior typically demonstrates a team’s ability to focus on work that generates the highest value instead of majoring on the minors.
A small minority of ideas will be completed. The only conclusion of an idea which has the potential to generate value is when it is complete.
Some ideas are started but abandoned before they are completed. Abandonment is often the result of shifting priorities which cause an idea to be returned to the backlog (or option pool). The idea has a high likelihood of being started again in the future but not so soon that it makes sense to keep it in-progress. A decision to abandon work is wasteful, as there is a very high likelihood that most, if not all, of the time and effort initially invested into the idea will be reworked when the idea is resurrected. Abandoning ideas is discouraged as it favors starting over finishing.
Some ideas are found to loose their market value while they are still in progress, which results in the idea being aborted. An aborted idea will not be completed now or at any point in the future. The decision to abort work is the most wasteful of all decisions and should be avoided at all costs.
By measuring the percentage of ideas that fall into each of these four categories a handful of simple, valuable metrics can be established. A team can learn a lot about the health of their decision-making by tracking and regularly discussing Discard Rate, Complete Rate, Abandon Rate, and Abort Rate.
