I just got home from a trip.
The housekeeper at the hotel worked in a way that many teams do.
And unfortunately, working this way leads to unhappy users.
I arrived at hotel a few hours before the scheduled check-in time.I was really hoping to check in early because I'd left my home at 3am.
Unfortunately, the Hotel said I would probably have to wait a couple of hours for a room to be available.
Oh well, I knew I was gambling that my room would be ready early.
I worked in the lobby for a few hours until my phone buzzed to tell me my room was ready.
The next day I discovered why my rooms hadn't been ready early the day before.
As I walked down the hotel hallway, I noticed the housekeeper had eight room doors open and appeared to be cleaning all of the rooms simultaneously.
I was curious, so I asked her why she was working on all the rooms at the same time.
She said it helped her ensure she did all of the steps in each room, from making the beds to replacing the toilet paper.
I ask her if it was faster to do all rooms that way.
she told me it probably was not faster, might even slow her down slightly, but it help ensure everything was done to every room.
It was purely a QA technique.
This housekeeper had a lot of work in process.
A lot rooms all being cleaned, but not yet fully cleaned.
Had she worked on one room at a time, I probably could have checked in early.
In addition to lengthening the time to value by keeping features out of the hands of users, having a can lead to additional problems,
including multitasking, which has been proven to be less efficient, hiding problems.
It's hard to detect problems while work is in process, creating a bottleneck for whomever will work on the items next, and decreased team member morale
because it takes so long for work to finished.
One of the easiest, quickest wins a team can have is to reduce its work in-process.
You probably can't outright stop work on things in Process, but you probably cannot minimize how much new work is taken on until you clear out the queue
of work in process.
Had the hotel housekeeper finished one room before moving on to the next, I could have checked in early.
I would have been delighted.
Your customers will be delighted too when they receive new features more quickly.