Detecting Idle Work

If we are honest, work doesn’t always flow smoothly. If we are really honest, we often have no idea if work is flowing smoothly because there isn’t a clear way to measure “smooth”—or is there?

I often ask the attendees of my training classes, “What is the primary function of an automobile?” Of course, “transportation” is the obvious answer. I make the case to my students that an automobile makes a better solar panel than it does a mode of transportation. After all, a car spends most of it’s time motionless, soaking up the sun. Most people use their personal vehicles for only a handful of hours per day.

Work isn’t much different. If we closely examine the collaborative work we do, we’ll find that work we call in progress, in fact, starts and stops a lot. At many companies, work spends more time idle than it does underway. If you are a visual designer, you spend a lot of time waiting for creative reviews. If you are a developer, you spend a lot of time waiting for your code to be peer reviewed. In either of these cases, the time waiting for the review to occur is often longer than the review itself.

This state of work is called idle time. Idle time is waste. In lean, we strive to reduce waste–and, in my opinion, reducing idle time is one of the single biggest areas of improvement on which a team can focus.

In order to reduce idle time, we need to give a team the lexicon to identify it when they see it happening. I prefer using two words: underway and pullable.

Work which is underway is work that is actually being done at this very moment. Work which is pullable is done and is waiting for the next activity in the workflow to occur.

Whether we explicitly define our workflows or not, patterns exist for most of the collaborative work we do day-to-day. Before they become a reality, ideas traverse a workflow of diverse activities passing through the hands of people with highly specialized skills.

Figure 1—A basic Kanban workflow often seen in web development for teams organized cross-functionally.

As shown in Figure 1, Kanban is a highly effective method of visualizing work. However, the board above doesn’t give us any method for identifying whether work is underway or pullable. As shown in Figure 2, color is a very effective method of doing so.

Figure 2—A modification to Figure 1 demonstrating how to visually indicate pullable work.

As pullable work becomes visible, it’s easy to understand where to focus the effort of your team.

In future posts, we’ll discuss how we can combine the idea of underway and pullable with other social policies to create a pull system and dramatically improve our understanding of how efficiently we work.