Your Periodic Table of Work

What are the different kinds of work do you do? Do tasks change depending on some aspect of the work? Are you asked to guess how long it will take? Where do you get your answer?

Lean embodies the Scientific Method: Hypothesis and Test. Rather than estimating based on “gut feel”, uncertain memory or a group number-guessing game, we look at what actually happened the last time we had to do “this”. We hypothesize that this new similar piece of work will be accomplished in a similar way. And that is the key to making a realistic estimate.

Dig into each piece of work you do

Are there nuances or differences due to complexity, uncertainty, or technology? Are some types of work dependent on other teams or vendors? Does it matter who does the work? Who asked for it? What are the factors that made one thing take longer than something else? Specifically?

The Original Periodic Table

In the mid-1800’s, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev identified patterns in what was known 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 see any information that you could use to create categories?

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

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

Where do you get these attributes and parameters??

Before, during and after you’ve done the work.

Before you start the work, record all the information you gather when discussing everything that will go into finishing the work. Save all your hypotheses and assumptions. Which category does this item go in?

Keep this information visible while the work is underway, and note confirmations and surprises. Your actual work activities are the “test” of your hypotheses.

Review all of it upon completion of the work.?Reflect back on what you would have thought differently if you had known then what you know now. Adjust your categories accordingly.

?Be sure to track your cycle time.

Your taxonomy will change as you gather more variations. You will split some categories and recombine others. Did you discover “isotopes” or different elements altogether? What made a normal piece of work “radioactive”? Do you have some “ores” that could be refined or others cannot be separated into elements?

Remember that any arrangement of categories 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 an actual fact: the cycle time – how long it took to finish a sample of that kind of work. When you are given 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 standard deviation of all the previous times you done the same thing.

You can now make estimates based on this hard data – the “physics” of real experience. If the data show this type of work takes 5 days plus or minus a day, what estimate do you make?

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”: