When I posted How to See Your Leading, Lagging, and Reliable Estimation Metrics last week, a colleague suggested I was not quite right. He said that Aging is actually the leading indicator for more reliable data.
He is absolutely correct.
However, we don't always see the real problem. The reader who emailed me only saw the signals of the overall problem in her immediate sprints. She did not know where else to look. So in this sprint, she could look at throughput and see what was happening there. That's true even though throughput is an incomplete signal.
That's how most of us solve problems. We look locally for signals that represent the problem. And if we are not aware of the full picture, we think we can solve the problem. Do we even know how to see the whole picture? Probably not.
It's time to see the full picture, not just the signals of leading or lagging indicators. And that starts with aging.
This post is about aging and how to use aging to see where work hides. If you have not yet read Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers, please read that first.
How Aging Can Hide Work
Work hides—and ages—in many places. Here are some common places that most teams have:
- Defect tracking system.
- The current backlog of work. (In an iteration-based approach, this is the current sprint's work. In a flow-based approach, this is the Ready column.)
- Product roadmap and any other holders of product-focused functionality.
How much work is in each area?
You might have a defect tracking system full of defects from five or more years ago. All that work? It's hiding. Does anyone look at it when deciding what to do next?
How about the backlog? Too often, the backlog is just prioritized, not ranked. Instead, if you ranked the work, you might realize what is valuable to do next. And you might see how much work exists that is just so old it's not worth even evaluating.
Here's the problem with aging: If an item is old enough, it has little to no value now. That supposed work is just cognitive load that everyone sighs at, the next time they look at it.
That's where work hides. You know you have all this stuff: defects, backlog items, more functionality than you could ever imagine finishing.
You have an alternative. Throw all of that work out. (Yes, fine, put it on a parking lot instead if you're so attached to it.) But stop looking at it. Stop assessing it. If you're not going to do the work, eliminate it from consideration.
Why Aging is a Leading Indicator of Project Health
The older work gets, the more likely that work is to fall into one of two buckets:
- The work becomes an emergency. We have to do it now!!
- The work becomes irrelevant. It's there because it's always been there.
But the real issue is this: We have to examine the work, even the old work, to know that it is irrelevant. If you review the image at the top of this post, you can see that the older work gets (Aging), the more WIP (Work in Progress) everyone has. The higher the WIP, the longer the cycle time. The longer the cycle time, the lower the throughput.
All of that work creates pressure on the people doing the work and deciding on the work.
I've written a lot about feeling the pressure to do more in many of my newsletters and posts. Here's just one: How to Discover Another Sneaky Problem: Product Leaders Under Pressure.
Instead of allowing aging to hide the work, take a little time to bring the work into the open.
Consider Anti-Aging Conditions to Remove Hidden Work
Here are some possible ways to stop work from hiding:
- Eliminate every item in a defect-tracking database that is older than 30 calendar days. If you're not going to fix it, why would you keep it?
- Eliminate every item in a roadmap that is older than 30 calendar days. If you can't get to it now, why would you keep it? Good ideas come around again. But the more work a team finishes, the more likely they are to get a better idea.
- Monitor aging.
Just as I like teams to monitor their cycle time, it's worth a team's time to monitor their aging. (This applies to management teams, too.)
Use Aging As a Leading Indicator
Don't allow old ideas to permeate your work. Free yourself from all that aging. Instead, now that you know about the flow metrics, use aging as a leading indicator. Toss that old work. Or, stop starting new work and finish that old work. Or, archive that work in some way, “just in case” you need to see it again.
But stop keeping things around just because you have always done so. Know where your work hides and use aging as a leading indicator to restore your project's health.