Tiny Tweaks that lead to Big Impact on Focus and Flow

I find it absolutely absurd that almost no issue trackers have implemented a few cheap but wildly effective tweaks that can vastly improve the team’s focus and so therefore improves the team’s flow. 

Prioritized / started / done Macro-states

I know all the kanban-ish products let you have multiple columns to represent multiple states, but there are 3 critical macro states that all the columns really fall under: Prioritized, In-Progress, and Completed.  A team with good focus and good flow needs keep these macro states in mind for every column.  I’ll give you examples of how they should affect the management of cards in a column:

Order of cards in a column

If we want to focus on the most important things, it means that the most important cards in a ticket tracker need to be at the top of their columns.  You shouldn’t have to search or even scroll for the most important cards of a column.Specifically:

The “Completed” column should be ordered from most recently completed first to least recently completed last.  It should read like blog of the team’s successes and conquered challenges.  It’s most valuable in this order both for celebration and for easier context-sharing.  This is pretty trivially done in a software product that can tell that a Completed column is a completed column.

Prioritized columns should have the top priority card at the top and lesser priorities below in priority order.  Steven Covey’s 3rd habit of Highly Effective people is “First things first” and we want our prioritized columns to reflect that and make it obvious what work the team should pull first.  I’ll admit that for this, a product can’t really help today so it’s up to the discipline of the team because “priority” is such a hand-wavy thing, but a tool should know what columns are “prioritized columns” so it doesn’t do any automatic sorting for you.    

In-Progress Columns are probably the most important columns to consider.  They should ideally be ordered by the amount of time since they were started.  This puts the most recently started cards on the bottom and least recently started cards on top.  Putting the oldest in-progress card on top puts the focus on finishing those cards that we’ve been working on the longest before finishing other cards.  If we’ve got a partial investment in a card, it’s pure waste until we actually deliver it.  The longer it waits in a partial state, the less value we get from it.  On my teams we express this value as “Finishing > Starting”.

Number of cards in a column

The “Finishing > Starting” value is also a clear way to promote focus.  Focus is really nothing more than working on as few things at once as possible. 

For in-progress columns, it’s worth tracking the number of cards in the column at all times if you’re looking for problems with lack of focus.  If you’ve got 3 devs on the team and 12 cards in progress, something is probably going wrong and it’s worth a warning or at least an easy way to count other than counting things manually.

The Prioritized columns should also probably be limited as much as possible, so you should at least be aware of the number of items in each column.  If you’ve got a backlog of things that goes for months, there’s a good chance you’re either (1) not being very iterative and learning from each release or (2) you’ve got a bunch of cards that you’re going to have to throw out.  In both cases there’s a good chance that you’re creating tons of waste of hurting the focus of the team.  I don’t think the issue-tracking should actually do any limiting, but it’s pretty useful to just see the counts of these columns as well as a kind of gut-check for the people that know they should care.

The “Completed” column should automatically cull cards older than a month or two so it’s not growing ad infinitum unnecessarily.  In general, cards that you don’t need on a regular basis should be hidden away as much as possible to promote focus on the ones that matter.  Ancient and completed cards should be an obvious target. 

 Why does all this even matter?!?!?

Lack of focus means: 

• Slower delivery of the top priorities
• Some efforts get starved or blocked entirely without us noticing
• Confusion about what to work on or help with

I find it pretty wild that these ticket trackers have so many features to manage 10s of thousands of work items at a glance, when what teams really need is focus.  I can’t imagine the staggering waste caused by tools not supporting these cheap-to-implement basics.     

ANYWAY… I don’t really expect anyone to switch ticket-trackers for these seemingly minor improvements, but I do think they’re small examples of how much the tooling is still in the stone age, and just a taste of the pretty huge innovation that’s still possible.