A “Periodic Table” of Work

 What are the kinds of work do you do? Are there different things you do depending on some aspect of the work?

Are there nuances or differences due to complexity, uncertainty, or size? Do you switch between “regular” or scheduled work and “unplanned” or unscheduled work (such as production issues or defects)? What about small items, the “gnats and rats” that are too small to account for, yet eat up so much time? And your long term or large scale work you know will need to be split up?

 In the mid-1800’s, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev identified patterns in what was know about the elements. He created a table that used similarities in the properties and attributes of elements to group and order them, resulting in a Periodic Table of Elements.

Have you noticed any patterns in the work you do? Do you have enough information about each that you could use to classify them?

Could you create a “periodic table” for your work?

How would you do it? What are the attributes and parameters you would use to organize the categories?

Where do you get this information? 

Before, during and after you’ve done the work. The elements and interactions to complete the work provide a firehose of information.

Start by noting all the information used during refinement. Save all your hypotheses and assumptions. Keep all this visible while the work is underway, and note all the confirmations and surprises.

Review all of it upon completions. This is aidedby making all your work visible.

 

Be sure to include cycle time as one of the attributes you collect.

The taxonomy will change as you gather more variations. You will split some categories and recombine others. Are the variations “isotopes” or a different element altogether? What makes a normal piece of work “radioactive”?

Remember that any arrangement is a hypothesis to be confirmed or not by each additional work item taken up by the team. Where do you think it fits? Did it?

Why do this?

Each time you finish a specific type of work (“element”) you’ve collected data (cycle time) of how long it takes to finish that kind of work. When you get another similar piece of work, what is your best estimate of how long that new piece of work will take?

Of course – the statistical average and deviation of all the previous times you done the same thing.

You can now make estimates based on fact – the “physics” of actual experience.

You have moved your planning from the pre-scientific dark ages to modern reality. And you’ve given your team the perfect response to any push or pressure to get it done “sooner”.