apm 3 4a

Let's go back to our case study at Technova. Remember, you're a project Manager at Technova, a mid sized software development company, and you've been assigned to the Venus project. You start your Monday with a clear plan. You're going to finalize the release roadmap for Venus. You're going to conduct performance reviews, and you're going to prepare for Wednesday's PMO status meeting. As soon as you open your laptop, you're hit with a barrage of urgent requests. The CEO wants an impromptu strategy presentation by the end of the day. A critical bug is reported in the latest release, requiring immediate attention. A key team member unexpectedly calls in sick, throwing off your sprint plan. All of a sudden, the marketing team is demanding new features for an upcoming trade show. And then you realize the documentation update you've been postponing, it's actually blocking QA testing by day's end. You've dealt with these things, but you're exhausted. You've been busy all day, but your original tasks, they remain largely untouched. The roadmap isn't finished, performance reviews are still pending, and you're barely prepared for the PMO meeting. Now this scenario illustrates how unforeseen forces steal productivity and hinder our progress. In her fantastic book, Making Work Visible, Dominica de Grandis puts a name to these productivity sapping disruptions. She calls them the five time thieves. Invisible culprits that silently rob us of our most valuable resource, time. The first time thief is unplanned work, like the critical bug fix and the CEO's request. These are things that just pop up with no notice and interrupt you and really stop you from getting your planned work done. The next time thief is conflicting priorities. That's planned versus urgent tasks. Multiple projects, each with their own number one priority. Or maybe you have two top priorities. They're all a top priority. Here's something interesting about the word priority. It was singular for centuries. The word came about in the 1400s and was used singularly, as in this is priority until the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Up until then, you could only have the singular priority. The next time thief is unknown dependencies, like finding out that having a person call in sick affects the entire sprint plan. I think I'm getting the black lung, Bob. There are things that maybe we didn't realize had to be done first before we could do the next thing. Or perhaps it's someone you're waiting on before you can get that thing done that you wanted to do. Our next time thief is neglected work like that postponed documentation update. It might also include things like technical debt or work that's kind of complete but not all the way done. Work that just sits there and festers and doesn't get to the finish line the last time thief. And you'll notice this one has the biggest clock. Each of them holds a portion of time, but this one has the biggest clock. And that's not coincidental. This one is too much work in progress or wip. Like our trying to juggle all those multiple urgent tasks at Technova on Monday. It creates that feeling at the end of the day when you're exhausted and you know you were busy but you just didn't get much done. You probably know the feeling. You just have too many plates spinning, too many things that you're trying to work on at the same time. And in her book, Domenica highlights this one as being the most impactful. So I want to spend a little bit of time talking about it. Okay, so you're exhausted after that long Monday. You jump in your car to head home along with everybody else, and you hit the highway to find what traffic Rush hour traffic. What happens when every possible car is on the highway? Traffic grinds to a halt. We intuitively understand that for traffic to flow smoothly, we need buffer space. You can't fill every inch of the road and expect things to move efficiently. The same principle applies to our work. The more tasks we have in progress simultaneously, the less buffer we have in our schedule. It's like filling every lane in our mental highway. Here's the key. The higher your wip, the more things that you're working on at once, the lower your throughput becomes and the longer your lead times. Now, lead time is just the total duration from when a task is started to when it's completed. Now, counterintuitively, the more we try to do it once, the less we actually accomplish and the longer each task takes to finish tasks. Spend more time waiting in queues and we experience more context. Switching delays become frequent. All these factors extend our lead times. We become less able to complete tasks and get work out the door efficiently. By reducing wip, we can significantly shorten our lead times and increase our throughput. This allows us to deliver work more quickly and responsibly, ultimately accomplishing more by trying to do less simultaneously. To counter this, we need to implement tools and strategies that help us limit the amount of work in progress at any given time. This might involve techniques like visualizing your work on a Kanban board. So sometimes just seeing all your work helps bring clarity and a realization of where you're spending your time. Time Boxing techniques like the Pomodoro method, where you work in focused 25 minute intervals followed by short breaks and the last one ruthless prioritization and task triage. Get in the habit of only working on the highest priority, singular priority work. Which means we're going to need to get comfortable saying no or not now. Okay? Now think about your last Monday at work. Did you accomplish all the things you'd hoped to that day, or did the day seem to slip away from you? Which of these techniques that I just described do you think you could try this week? By managing our WIP effectively, we can create the mental buffer space needed for smooth, efficient workflow. Just as we wouldn't try to cram every possible car onto a highway, we can't overload our work capacity. So there you have it, the five time thieves of unplanned work conflicting priorities, unknown dependencies, neglected work, and too much work in progress. As you go about your work this week, try to spot those time thieves in action. By actively managing these unseen forces, you can take control of your time, increase your productivity, and reduce the stress and frustration that comes from feeling like your day has slipped away from you. And for us, as Agile project managers, this isn't only about productivity. It's about creating an environment where teams can collaborate efficiently, projects can progress smoothly, and organizations can deliver value consistently. And by helping teams deal with these time thieves, we're not just improving our own work lives, but we're contributing to a more effective and less stressful work culture for everybody.