Mike Lyons (speaker) argues that most work on software teams is invisible and that teams should make both work and workflow steps visible. He presents visualization as the first Kanban practice: map where work comes from (backlog), then show workflow steps (example: backlog → design → build → test → production → accepted), create cards with enough info to decide readiness to move, and use low-fidelity sketches as a first pass. He recommends the Kanban Tool (free) for swim lanes, WIP limits, and reporting (lead time, cumulative flow diagram) and challenges listeners to refine beyond "to do / doing / done."
Questions this video answers
Roughly 2/3 of people.
Backlog → Design → Build → Test → Production → Accepted.
Measuring lead time and cumulative flow diagram (plus other metrics).
Create swim lanes for classes of service, apply WIP limits to workflow steps, and create individual work item types.
Chapters
Did you know that roughly 2/3 of people are visual spatial learners? That is, they learn better by seeing. It's interesting. I know that's true for me. I like to see what I'm working on. I like to see the work that's ahead of me and even the work that I've completed. Scrum Masters, this is important for you because, let's face it, most of our work, well, it's invisible, isn't it? I can't see it, I can't touch it, I can't feel it. Consider that we're on a software development team. It's zeros and ones floating around in the ether. Sure, it's checked in the code repo, but no one can see it until it actually becomes. Becomes a usable product. Let's say the work is visible. Maybe we're on a Scrum team and we're creating sort of training documents. Those things are visible as we're creating them. But what's not visible is how that work is progressing through the system. And so it's important, no matter what our products are, that we're making work visible. And that leads us to our first practice of Kanban Visualize. We want to visualize the workflow. We want to visualize the work. We want to not only make the work visible, but we want to make the workflow steps visible. How does that work move through our system? All right, let me see it. Show it to me. So we start with where does work come from? Sort of the birds and the bees of the creation of work. Scrum Masters, you'll recognize this as your backlog. Your product owner prioritizes that. Of course, it's all the things you might do. Well, that's where your work comes from. So what happens next? The work enters your system. You pull it into your system. Is it. Maybe. Maybe it's design. Okay, that's great. So what happens after you design? What's the next step? Perhaps it's build. Well, we start developing on it. We start creating the thing, we start writing the lesson plan. We start developing the software. Now what do you do? Well, we've got to test it. We've got to have validated in some form. So you test your software. What happens next? Well, then we push it up all the way to production and then we're done. Okay. Are we sure we're done? Let's add an accepted column where we'll finalize all of our work. Accepted should be familiar to you. Scrum Masters. This is when your product owner accepts your user story. Visualize the flow as is. Okay. Don't try to sort of create a future state or. I wish we did. No, start where you're at. Just visualize the current workflow. And so now we need to visualize the work itself. And so you'll create some form of agreed upon card or a way to visualize the work. Now most of your tools are going to do this for you. It's going to have a title and maybe a description. It's going to have a place for people to put their name on it when they pull it in and work on it. And that can change as it flows through the system. Of course it might have a place to do if you like doing some form of estimation or, or any metrics maybe you're gathering, number of days it's been worked on, whatever things like that. The point is that we're making work itself visible as it moves through the workflow steps we just established. And just a tip here on card design, what should be on there? It's going to be different on your teams. But consider you need enough information on that card to make a decision as to whether or not it's ready to move into the next step. So we want to, we want to make sure that we have all of the information on that card readily available to us. And so now it's your turn. I'd like you to visualize your work. Take a first cut at your workflow steps. What are they? Where does it start? Where does it end? Grab a piece of paper and just write it down. Mean let's just low fidelity. It doesn't have to be perfect. If you want to grab a tool, there's many free tools available to you. Okay, Scrum masters, are you looking for a tool you can use to visualize your work? Let me introduce you to Kanban Tool. Out of the box and for free. It allows you to create swim lanes for your classes of service. Apply WIP limits to your workflow steps and has some built in reporting capabilities including measuring lead time, cumulative flow diagram and some other great metrics. You can even create individual work item types which can be super beneficial as you're tracking where you're spending your time on various types of work. So there you have it. Kanban Tool. We're going to use it in this course. Give it a try for yourself. But get a good enough first cut at your workflow. You'll refine it. Let me challenge you a bit. Don't just write to do doing done. We can do better than that. I'll give you to do and done. Okay, but doing. Let's get a couple three things in there, right? So that's our first principle. Visualize. Make the invisible visible.
