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

If you like "The Phoenix Project", you must read this - and if you didn't read it, you should read it anyway.

This book should be considered a standard reference for practical Kanban and how to manage work.
It is split in to three parts:

* Part one explains the five thieves of time
* Part two shows how to use Kanban to hunt down these thieves
* Part three is about creating Metrics and getting Feedback

The content is from practitioners for practitioners which makes this book one of the most valuable I' ...more

Critical Reading for Anyone Who Does Work

I started this book with a decent understanding of Kanban techniques and expected a similar recap of those ideas, maybe with a focus on IT Ops. What I got was so much more!

While this may seem evident from the title - "Making Work Visible", there is so much more uncovered in this book than just getting your tasks in columns on a whiteboard.

I've spent most of my IT career focused on automation of tasks. One of the first challenges we face when starting any ...more

If this is the first time you're hearing about Kanban style of working, you can consider this book almost a 4-star: it is very readable, with a lot of anecdotes from the author's professional challenges, and conveys the most fundamental concepts and terms in a colorful, easy-to-digest manner by using many examples. In other words, if you're just curious, this is not a bad starting point at all.

On the other hand, if you're a professional with even one or two years of experience in organizations a ...more

Excellent handbook and review of Lean and kanban practices I'm already using at work, describes several things we can be doing better, and considering the traction this book has at work right now, I bet we'll be making process changes soon.

Engaging read, easy to understand, attractive layout and graphics. Could have used an editor (cost reasons I bet) as I saw a good many typos, plus the use of both acceptable spellings of queueing / queuing. ...more

I discovered Making Work Visible when I needed it most and was most ready for it. It is a canonical book for anyone who wants to be effective at getting the right things done in the right amount of time.

Why It Mattered To Me

I was two months into my journey as a manager for a small technical team whose primary responsibility was to manage an overwhelmingly active queue of support requests.

I was struggling with two major tensions:

1. "How do I know the work we're doing is the right work for the ...more

I was a bit afraid that when you have already read several books on Lean and Kanban then the added value from one more book might be marginal. On high level this was the case but there were still several interesting thoughts in the book. It's a mix of different books ("This is LEAN", "Personal KANBAN", many quotes from Goldratt (THE GOAL) and another reminder to finally complete "Drive" from Daniel Pink. Authordidn't say it directly but there were several subliminal references to Phoenix Project ...more

Making Work Visible is the best book on Lean-Kanban that I have read to date and I have read quite a bit. This book stands out from the other books on Kanban, Lean and Agile processes books in a unique way by clustering the core problems that Kanban was originally designed to solve via Visualization.

There are mainly five categories of problems which are presented as Time thieves in the book, namely:
1 - Thief Too Much WIP
2 - Thief Conflicting Priorities
3 - Thief Unplanned Work
4 - Thief Neglected ...more

This book struck me as mostly a love-letter to kanban. It had practical advice for how to put it into practice, but I found it short of ideas on how to make it _better_ within my operating environment.
For a bit Degrandis started talking about probabilistic prediction, and I got excited about that, but she never suggested a useful formula for calculating it.
Probably the most thought-provoking bit for me in this book was the application of Little's Law to a kanban board. I happen to think a lot ab ...more

read most of this book in one big gulp - I simply could not stop myself.
My immediate feeling after reading it is that my head is spinning with things I need to try.

The content is super actionable, clear and beautifully presented. Also, everything is well grounded in practice & theory - the author oozed experience through the stories.
On top of that there's nice splash of fun to keep me reading.

I recommend this book to anyone doing Kanban, Lean, Agile or Scrum ...more

This is a concise introduction to Kanban, focusing on the idea that your teams and colleagues need a way to see (with their eyes . . .) work so that it can be planned, discussed, and remove surprises from the organization. I would say that if you're a new practitioner of some kind of agile methodology (Scrum, Kanban, whatever) and want to tune up your work boards, this book could help quite a bit. It is not doctrinaire, and provides a lot of different patterns; no specific software package is di ...more

I started this book in late 2020 and despite its short length, 200 pages with lots of pictures, I struggled to reach the finish line. 5 pages here, 10 there. I had difficulty remaining focused on topic. A year ago, I had read “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim. It was twice as long and covered the same topics but in story book fashion. That worked for me. I still rave about that book today. I bought “Making Work Visible” to gain insight into why my 2020 seemed overly work heavy despite not spendi ...more

How to describe this book? Kanban in the most simple words possible (w/o trespassing the border of not respecting reader's intelligence ;>).
Who I'd recommend this book to? All the people who think that "Kanban" is just a layout of issues in JIRA (yes, there are more of them one could expect ...).
Is it a good book? Decent enough - it's still better to read Anderson's original book, BUT I'm aware that many people won't. So in such case, MWV is still a good choice - sensible starter for building up ...more

This book is amazing.

I don't think anything in it is revolutionary in content, but what it is is a succinct and plain-spoken gathering of a starting set of understanding and things you can do to start developing a handle on an IT team that feels itself to be drowning in work and/or fighting a losing battle against expectations of productivity.

The central thesis of this book is that if you do not have a way of quickly visualizing a team (or, at a high level, an organization's) work you will allow ...more

“Making Work Visible” is awesome! The book is divided into three parts.

The first introduces the five thieves: too much WIP, unknown dependencies, unplanned work, conflicting priorities and neglected work. The author personifies the thieves nicely and talks about them like they are alive. I liked the “it was the cloud provider that did it in the data center with the candlestick.” I don't know about you, but these five thieves have been busy on most projects that I've worked on!

Part two is the me ...more

Some good ideas, nothing special

Fortunately the book is short.

Tell you what I won't do: get a physical board and stick postit notes on it. That's what she's proposing. I'm sorry, but I won't do that. It's very easy for these consultants, while on their workshops, to get out big whiteboards and stick postit notes on them.
Vert romantic, but wrong. I'm working with JIRA at work, and am limited by it. I won't change from JIRA to postits, because JIRA has a lot of benefits, mostly regarding communic ...more

In 2015, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry's book Personal Kanban changed the way I did work, so when I saw that Tonianne did the Foreward for Making Work Visible, I took notice.

I judge a book on how quickly it makes me take action. I put some of the principles from this book into effect on the same day as reading them. I have been using personal kanban since 2015, but the way Ms. Degrandis described how she uses kanban made me rethink how I was doing it. I made some simple changes to my per ...more

Apr 11, 2020

Jeff

rated it really liked it

An exceptional argument for why so many workplaces are full of so many overworked, busy people, yet everything seems to take forever to get done. In short, there’s too much WIP (work in progress) and not enough idle time or slack capacity.

Great, jargon will help us? Let me explain how these go together.

Most of us think we need to be doing something productive 100% of the time at work, right? So if we find ourselves with some spare time, we start up something new. We add more work into the syste ...more

"It's ridiculously hard to manage invisible work."

This sentence essentially sums up the purpose of this book--making work visible in order to better manage it. The book lays out five major causes for work not getting done, presented as "time thieves". Any good book on Lean / Kanban likely presents many of the same causes, such as Too Much WIP, Unknown Dependencies, Unplanned Work, Conflicting Priorities, and Neglected Work.

This book provided a great combination of good descriptions of each time ...more

This book was exactly what I needed, when I needed it. DeGrandis takes the complexities of kanban-flavored agile and boils them down into actionable steps by talking about how you can solve specific problem (or Time Theives) by making your work more visible to stakeholders and yourself.

I think it's probably going to be more valuable if you have a basic understanding of kanban and limited work in progress, but she does cover it. This is more like a book for the second six months of your kanban tr ...more

Degrandis does a great job defining and putting a face on a set of "time thieves" that prevent us from getting work done. The central theme is visibility. The more we make visible, the better we can understand what is stealing our time and make adjustments. Further, we can effectively communicate within and without our teams about the things that impact our work. This leads to setting better expectations and greater satisfaction, overall. And while the book recommends a Kanban approach to managi ...more

A well written book about the value and mechanics of using kanban on work projects, especially software projects.

The paperback is also very well published, with attractive illustrations by the author. In a book about making things visible, the pictures are certainly important.

Some of the key takeaways for me:
- Good explanation of using kanban and pull to manage work. This is good for projects and also for non-project work.
- Work-In-Progress (WIP) is not "effecient multitasking". It makes LESS ge ...more

Picked it up as a relaxing quick-read after emotionally draining fantasy trilogy. Turned out to be a painful almost three month journey.

There are 5 time wasting things one should avoid:
1. Too many tasks in progress (WIP)
2. Unknown dependencies.
3. Unplanned work.
4. Conflicting priorities.
5. Abandoned work.

Kanban helps to visualize these things.

Surprisingly picked up a few interesting ideas at the very end of the book:
1. Standups are useless if everyone just says what they've been doing. Just use ...more