{"id":12652,"date":"2015-04-10T13:13:42","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T18:13:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/?p=12652"},"modified":"2020-02-25T13:20:38","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T19:20:38","slug":"using-the-lean-decision-filter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/","title":{"rendered":"Using the Lean Decision Filter: Should I finish what I\u2019m working on or help the team ready new work items?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-12653\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/y1-1024x438.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"438\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/y1-1024x438.png 1024w, https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/y1-1024x438-300x128.png 300w, https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/y1-1024x438-768x329.png 768w, https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/y1-1024x438-750x321.png 750w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Once people start to get \u201cStop Starting Start Finishing\u201d thinking (Kanban) or \u201cfocus on the current sprint\u201d thinking (Scrum), a frequent question that comes up is how to deal with people who are required for different activities throughout the work life cycle.<\/p>\n<h3>Example Scenarios<\/h3>\n<p>The Kanban board shown above\u00a0illustrates the following scenarios. Users \u201cD1\u201d and \u201cD2\u201d represent\u00a0the developers, and user \u201cT1\u201d represents the tester.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m a tester who both participates in acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) specification workshop (upstream) and exploratory testing (downstream). The developers are free to start a new story. Should I help them with the ATDD thinking for a new card or focus on finishing the one I\u2019m working on?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m a developer who both analyzes new stories (you might call it backlog grooming if you\u2019re a Scrum team) and develops them. I see our backlog of ready stories is running low. Should I continue to work on my story or should I move to analyze some new ones?\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Stop Starting Start Finishing<\/h3>\n<p>\u201cStop Starting Start Finishing\u201d talks about finishing things and minimizing the waste of inventory. It seems to say always prefer to finish and not start. Why would we even consider a different approach? And indeed on some rare teams it is reasonable to work in a pure \u201cone piece flow\u201d mode where we focus on one thing, finish it, and then move to the next. But this requires a very high level of collective ownership and collaborative concurrent engineering. This is seldom the starting point and rarely an early achievement of teams trying to set up a more healthy flow of work.<\/p>\n<p>So, in the majority of the teams the challenge is that in order to maintain healthy flow people are typically working on different things. And when the work process of these teams is such that it requires different members of the team to take part in the work in separate areas of the life cycle \u2014 so they have to touch the work, leave it, and return to it \u2014 we have an issue. Maintaining healthy flow is now in conflict with \u201cStop Starting Start Finishing\u201d because you would typically always have something to finish, so when are you going to move left on your board or go to work on things related to your next sprint?<\/p>\n<h3>Lean Decision Filter<\/h3>\n<p>One concept that might help is the\u00a0\u201cLean Decision Filter\u201d:<\/p>\n<div title=\"Page 16\">\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Value trumps flow:<\/strong>\u00a0Expedite at the expense of flow to maximize value.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Flow trumps waste elimination:<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0Increase WIP if required to maintain flow, even though it will add waste.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Eliminate waste to improve efficiency:<\/strong>\u00a0Do not pursue economy of scale.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, based on the filter, what we can deduce is that if we need to start something new in order to maintain flow then this is what we should do \u2014 even if it is a potential waste \u2014 since we could have focused on finished something.<\/p>\n<p>BTW: In a lot of Scrum teams, this manifests as the heuristic to spend 10% of the team\u2019s capacity on preparing for the next sprint.<\/p>\n<p>A way to decrease the waste of context switching while maintaining flow is to use an ongoing cadence. For example, hold specification workshops or backlog grooming sessions at a regular time each week. This minimizes the impact of the context switch since it provides some heads up for people, instead of surprising them and pressuring them to move to something else. (Otherwise the rest of the team will be idle.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>The Bottom Line<\/h3>\n<p>One of the first steps to really getting Kanban or Scrum is to start thinking \u201cStop Starting Start Finishing.\u201d But the Lean Decision Filter helps us apply the required common sense to real-world situations, where this seems to be in conflict with effective flow \u2014 which is actually what we are striving for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once people start to get \u201cStop Starting Start Finishing\u201d thinking (Kanban) or \u201cfocus on the current sprint\u201d thinking (Scrum), a frequent question that comes up is how to deal with people who are required for different activities throughout the work life cycle. Example Scenarios The Kanban board shown above\u00a0illustrates the following scenarios. Users \u201cD1\u201d and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":156,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[511],"class_list":["post-12652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work-collaboration","tag-leankit"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.8 (Yoast SEO v26.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Using the Lean Decision Filter - Blog | Planview<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Once people start to get \u201cStop Starting Start Finishing\u201d thinking (Kanban) or \u201cfocus on the current sprint\u201d thinking (Scrum), a frequent question that comes up is how to deal with people who are required for different activities throughout the work life cycle.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Using the Lean Decision Filter: Should I finish what I\u2019m working on or help the team ready new work items?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Once people start to get \u201cStop Starting Start Finishing\u201d thinking (Kanban) or \u201cfocus on the current sprint\u201d thinking (Scrum), a frequent question that comes up is how to deal with people who are required for different activities throughout the work life cycle.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Planview Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/Planview-Inc\/89422974772\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-04-10T18:13:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-02-25T19:20:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/y1-1024x438.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Yuval Yeret\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@Planview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@Planview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Yuval Yeret\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Yuval Yeret\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/#\/schema\/person\/f2e72e8dabfa446baeb0fb918f42f6e8\"},\"headline\":\"Using the Lean Decision Filter: Should I finish what I\u2019m working on or help the team ready new work items?\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-04-10T18:13:42+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-02-25T19:20:38+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/\"},\"wordCount\":657,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/y1-1024x438.png\",\"keywords\":[\"LeanKit\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Work Management for Teams\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/using-the-lean-decision-filter\/\",\"name\":\"Using the Lean Decision Filter - 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