Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

by Dominica DeGrandis, Tonianne DeMaria (Foreword by)

Overview

If someone stole your wallet, you'd notice it. So why don't people notice when they are robbed of something much more valuable than their wallet—time? Today’s workers are drowning: nonstop requests for time, days filled to the brim with meetings, and endless nights spent heroically fixing the latest problems. This churn and burn is creating a workforce constantly on the edge of burnout. In this timely book, IT time management expert Dominica DeGrandis reveals the real crime of the century—time theft, one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations.
Through simple solutions that make work visible, DeGrandis helps people round up the five thieves of time and take back their lives with time-saving solutions. Chock-full of exercises, takeaways, real-world examples, colorful diagrams, and an easy-going writing style, readers will quickly learn effective practices to create high-performing workflows within an organization.
The technology world—and indeed the whole business world—is moving at a pace faster than ever before, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Instead of consigning ourselves to the pressure cooker of the modern world, it’s time to elevate how we work. It’s time to level up our game. It’s time to make work visible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942788157
Publisher:	IT Revolution Press
Publication date:	11/14/2017
Pages:	205
Sales rank:	1,028,978
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Dominica DeGrandis is one of the top experts of kanban flow in the IT industry today. Along with being a sought-after speaker at industry conferences, Dominica writes articles for industry publications such as Cutter IT and TechBeacon. As Director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop Technologies, Dominica combines experience, theory, and practice to help organizations level up their capability to improve workflow to optimize delivery of business value. She lives in Washington state with her husband and two of their four children. She blogs at ddegrandis.com and tweets at @dominicad.

Table of Contents

Table of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: The 5 Thieves of Time 1.1 Too Much Work-in-Progress (WIP) 1.2 Unknown Dependencies 1.3 Unplanned Work 1.4 Conflicting Priorities 1.5 Neglected Work Part 2: How To Expose Time Thieves In Order To Optimize Workflow2.1 Make Work Visible 2.2 Ambush the Ring Leader 2.3 Expose Dependencies 2.4 Committing the perfect crime using Unplanned Work 2.5 How to Prioritize 2.6 Preventing Negligence2.7 Random Board Examples Part 3: Metrics, Feedback, Pomp & Calibration3.1 Your Metrics or your Money 3.2 The Time Thief O’Gram 3.3 Operations Reviews 3.4 The Art of Meeting (Standups, Lean Coffee)3.5 Undercover Investigation3.6 Beastly Practices3.7 Calibration: From Adversaries to Allies GlossaryTable of Exercises/List of Charts, Graphs, Illustrations Etc. ReferencesIndexAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorResources

Editorial Reviews

Many of us wear our busyness as a badge of honor. In Making Work Visible,Dominica DeGrandis shows us how we can make hidden work-in-process visible, to clearly see the effect it has on our ability to get things done. Once we can see it, she dives deep into the hidden aspects of our WIP that steal our time, energy, and productivity, along with strategies for combating each of them. Making Work Visible helps us to take a step back from all that busyness and really see.

Chris Hafley

I love this book! Dominica DeGrandis talks about the chronic problems we all have in knowledge work and technology work in a way that is breezy, familiar,and often irreverent, but also shows off decades of learnings and concrete techniques we can quickly adopt, both at work and at home. Also wonderfully rewarding is when DeGrandis describes the theory of why these practices work,in a way that is accessible and enlightening

Gene Kim

It is about time someone addresses time theft (aka the perfect crime) head on. Not only does Dominica provide a lot of the why behind the forces that cause us to make bad decisions about our time, she also provides ideas of what to do about them. I wish I had this book when I took my first management job!

Julia Wester

The most practical book I've seen on making processes lean. Dominica's deep experience coaching companies is fully on display as she walks the reader through a series of exercises to find waste and eliminate it―or, in her terms,to catch those sneaky "time thieves" in the act. Read this on a Sunday and you'll want to start trying out the exercises on Monday!

Mark Schwartz

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