Many Levels of
Work Visualization
John Heintz john@gistlabs.com @jheintz
Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium
Owner of Gist Labs, Austin, TX, USA
Lean India Summit 2013, Bangalore, India
© Gist Labs 2013
About me
n  John Heintz

•  Developer since 1995
•  Agilist since 1999
•  Founded Gist Labs in 2008

n  Developer, Mentor, Consultant, Writer, Speaker
n  Intuitive, Abstract, Precise
n  I take my work seriously, not myself

The things I believe in:
Agile/Lean/Kanban, REST, Mentoring, Craftsmanship, Systems,
Emergence, InnovationGames, and Teams
© Gist Labs 2013

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Work Visualization
Why this topic??
A little theory…
… and a little practice for each of:
n  Personal Work
n  Team Work
n  Cross-Organization Work
n  Collaborative Roadmapping

Closing
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Why visualize our work?

n Purpose requires focus,

on the right things

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Why visualize our work?

n See the whole,

or we’re doomed to sub-optimize

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Personal: Visualize Your Work!

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Team Work, Kanban
UX


Dev/Test


Ready


Done

Ready


X


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InProg

Y


Ready

Z3


InProg

Z2


Z1


Z4


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Kanban for Dev/Test

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Kanban for DevOps

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DevOps Pipelines

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Jenkins Build Pipeline Plugin

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Many Teams in Sequence: Value Stream Maps

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Cross-Organization Work, Programs

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Cross-Organization Work, Programs

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Cross-Organization Work, Programs

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Mapping Programs to Teams

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Mapping Program to Teams, more Collaboration

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Planning with 17 Teams

n  Three month quarterly planning
n  6 sprints, 2 weeks long
n  Programs and dependencies

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Collaborative Roadmapping
Multi-Level Roadmapping
Time Horizon (quarters to years)

Market 

Map

Feature/Benefit

Map


Architecture


?


Events/Rhythms

...


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Roadmapping Patterns

n  Bring a cross-section of org

together to plan
n  Marketing/sales, Product, Arch,

Dev, Infrastructure, …

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Roadmapping in Practice…

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Terrible Road Map, but the Realizations…

“I don’t think we can do everything”, participant

“We’ve unearthed two or three strategic disconnects”, participant

“I didn’t think we were over-committed, but we are”, CEO

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Distributed Roadmapping?

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Closing

Vision
Years

Roadmap


Months


Release Plan

Sprint Plan


Weekly


Daily


Standup Meeting


Hours

Continuous Integration

Minutes


© Gist Labs 2013

TDD


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Many Levels of
Work Visualization
John Heintz john@gistlabs.com @jheintz
Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium
Owner of Gist Labs, Austin, TX, USA
Lean India Summit 2013, Bangalore, India
© Gist Labs 2013

Work visualizations