Control intake

You know the old adage "You can't get a quart into a pint pot" ?

Try it for yourself: take a small glass and a larger jug, like in the picture. Fill the jug with water. Next, pour the water from the jug into the glass. Keep pouring. What is going to happen as the glass fills up?

You have a choice. You can either limit the amount of water you pour and stop when the glass is full. Or, keep pouring and tidy up the mess afterwards.

When it comes to the work environment people try to fit a quart into a pint pot all the time. This usually results in a mess, complaints and unhappy customers.

Some do it because they believe workers only perform under pressure. Others because they are too optimistic. But perhaps most of all, it happens because in the modern work place, it is hard to know when people are full. How do you know if someone has capacity to do more work or not?

Here visualising work can make a direct improvement quickly: when work is managed visually you can see when people are busy because you can see the board is full.

Your aim is to only inject as much work into the system as you think it can do at any one time. When work runs out you can replenish it. When the work is shown visually on a tracking board you can see what is happening and when the work is running out.

There are various clever ways to calculate the best number of tasks and to forecast completion times but the simplest thing is to ask: "do you think we have enough work?"

Some teams establish a regular schedule to re-load, or replenish. This might be one a week or every fortnight, a regular rhythm.

Other teams will reload on demand. They keep pulling and doing work until it runs out and then call a replenishment meeting. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages - it would take far too long to discuss here. Call me if you want to.

Over time you will come to understand team capacity. The key thing is not to overload the system and create a mess.

Finally, prioritise every piece of work you schedule relative to the others. Form a list of tickets from highest priority at the top, to lowest at the bottom. The one at the top is the most likely to get done and the one at the bottom the one most likely to fall off.

Count how many tickets get done each week, ideally draw a graph and add each weeks tally. After a few weeks you will know team capacity. Next you can talk to the team about how to increase that capacity.

Lesson: don't schedule more than you expect to be done, and prioritise all work entering the system.