This post is my live blog from KCDC. For more, see the 2021 KCDC live blog TOC

Speaker: Sarah Harper

Twitter @sarita1119

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Why work gets stuck

• Work moves through the system until it gets stuck in a phase
• We like to think of things as a process problem. However, often a behavioral issue (not like major HR leve problems)
• Reasons: someone out sick, not enough people know how to do something, blame testing
• Agile black holes!
• Detrimenta to process and team morale
• Not obvious what problem is
• examples: deployment, business requirements, code review, qa
• Biggest black hole is the backlog

Back hole theory

• Any work status which acts as a “holding pen” for work items will eventuallly turn into a black hole
• Once enough are blocked for same reason, all future items will becme blocked
• It becomes acceptable for things to get blocked there
• No work appears to be done to outside observer – unclear who working on or what it is up to

Symptoms

• Queue busts – something wrong and swarm around it. Teams decides to focus on something like a customer service queue.
• Eceeed WIP limits
• Blocked column
• Too much in “done” or “ready” columns
• Long staging cycle time

Learned Helplessness

• Exercise: everyone got a piece of paper with three anagrams and people raised their hand as solved
• One one side, first two not soleable. One other side, first two easy. Then same third one.
• Taught first group learned helplessness.
• Trained to give up.
• I tried X times to change this

Locus of control

• Exercise: how much control do you have over weather, food you eat, comute, home, projects at wor, team member participation. (Scale of none to all)
• Think about what under control
• Don’t blame others for things can control
• Be alert when someone says can’t/imposssible

Self handicapping

• Don’t try so can’t fail
• Fear of looking bad
• ”give to X because X can do fastest” – setting team up for failure if that person can’t do it.
• That person becomes busy and a black hole
• ”You miss 100% o the shots you don’t take”

Somebody else’s problem and the bystander effect

• Brain edits it out because someone ese’s problem
• Everyone ignores
• May or may not actually be someone else’s responsibity
• Bystander effect – assume someone else will take charge

How spot black holes

• If have to scroll in a kanan board, have a black hole
• Not obvious

Visual principles

• Excercise: think about your kanban board For each of these principles
• Figure ground – foreground vs background. What see vs ignore. Showed optical illusion of face/vase. Usually digital boards have a white background so white cards disappear into background. Can make a different color to stand out. Also, if something has a date contraint or a high priority, add contrast.
• Common region – when obects located in same region, we perceive them as being grouped together. If everything looks the same, can’t tell. Change blocked cards to a different color
• Similarity – thinks that look the same are assumed to be the same.
• Proximity – things close together appear to be more related than things spaced farther apart. This is more of an effect than similiarity
• Continuity – Elements on a ine are considered more related. Lines follow the smoothest path.
• Focal point – watever stands out visually will attract and hold our attention
• Closure – we try to find recognizable patterns
• Just noticeabe difference – hard to see Jira dots for how long in state
• Idea: have blocked work in a different color, in a lane on top. So you can see status blocked in.
• Avoid too much color

Game: https://getkanban.com/pages/free-version

Escaping back holes

• Have team talk about problem
• Visualize future state and take action
• Use a physical board or customize digital board as much as can
• FInd an influencer on team that will give good feedback and help team accept idea
• Queue bust (swarm around problem)
• Root cause everything

My take

I learned a lot at this session. I like how it was different than a lot of agile talks. I have a bunch of things to take back