The wall of ignorance that prevents so many human beings from seeing each other clearly can only be breached by communication.
—Scott McCloud

PART

3

METRICS, FEEDBACK, AND CIRCUMSTANCES

It’s hard to see the big picture impact when all the thieves are secretly attacking your teams at the same time.

But if we shine a light on them and expose them by tagging them, then we can use our visual senses to discover how to put these thieves out of business. To do this, I use a tool I call the Thief O’Gram. It acts as a spotlight, magnifying risky elements from exposed time theft.

How do you know how well you and your teams are doing with this? That’s what Part 3 is all about. We’ll cover what, why, and how to measure the health of your workflow using flow metrics.

Figure 37. Teams Within Teams Board

In this part, we will discuss one of the most forgotten but important tools for communicating how the organization is doing—the operations review. It’s an objective, data-driven view into the fitness of the organization, camouflaged as a lightning talk. Facilitated time-boxed conversations provide a unique space to learn from and to have pivotal discussions, as we’ll see with Lean Coffee and other short but important discussions in Section 3.4. Approaches which help people enlighten us but get to the point quickly are necessary. We don’t want to give the thieves any more time to waste.

Exposing time theft is one giant step for humankind—a step that is relatively easy to take once you know where the five most wanted time thieves hide out. Now, it’s time to step up the game and convert the theft damage into metrics that will allow you to deduce the risk in your system, or the uncertainty, since risk is in the eye of the beholder. Show the uncertainty, so you can do something about it, and give your next decision some ammo. But doing this requires additional skills and more information than can’t be gained from blurry images in a crystal ball. Let’s start with how we measure success and what drives our decisions.