1-22: Stop ignoring work on ways of working

I’ve been trying to find a way to help people visualize the multiple ways that work comes to teams, that there are different types of work, and all that work has to be considered when it comes to what the team is focusing on at any given time. This image is about my third iteration in trying to demonstrate a view of two main types and flows of work that happen for a team.

• Circles represent activities done by the team (verbs)

• Squares represent output or artifacts used by the team (nouns)

• The green text represents the intent or the value of activities (why/purpose)

The image is incomplete and it doesn’t capture the interplay between some of these activities and objects the way that teams do it, as it might be a little too linear for them, but I still felt the need to try to depict this somehow.

I’ve seen some people talk about how they have a single combined roadmap of work versus two different roadmaps for product and improvement, and I think both ways can work. For the purposes of this picture, I wanted to make the loop back to “shaping/refining” and into the “backlog” explicit, as I think it’s one of the key places that the feed into the team’s work backlog breaks down.

I think that’s where a lot of work gets lost in some way:

• Work on the system of work gets ignored because it doesn’t have any visibility

  • It gets identified but doesn’t get captured

  • It gets identified and captured but doesn’t make it to shaping

• Work on the system of work gets deprioritized

  • The team identifies, captures and shapes the work but treats it separately

  • The team identifies, captures and shapes the work, but it gets buried in backlog and never gets prioritized

  • The team identifies, captures and shapes the work, but when they start it gets deprioritized in when the work starts

I’m going to give this a shot and see how this helps when working with teams, helping them consider all of the work so that it doesn’t get lost and they .

How does this match your experience?

What else would you add to this and why?