Last post on standardization. I had an epiphany: enforce standards on the what and not on the how of work. Teams need to identify what they spend time on—planned vs. unplanned work, bottlenecks and constraints.
Step one is visualizing that work. Or actually, step one is controlling the information flows to the team backlog. I view this as a funnel where you, the team, want to retain full control of the entry points to said funnel. I've used a triage process to great success in the past, which is a form of standardization on the flow of information from the outside world to the backlog.
Step two is figuring out capacity. Once the work is visualized capacity can be better gleaned from the Work In Progress (WIP). This informs the roadmap and planning sessions. It also allows us to more accurately adjust the level of slack in the team, both for improvments but also for the odd unknown unknown that pop up from time to time.
This is especially important for teams that feel like focus is slipping.
“Improving something anywhere not at the constraint is an illusion”.
We want to improve the throughput of the system, but time spent at anything that's not constraining does not improve throughput. It's hard to glean what the bottleneck is if the work is not visualized. Once visualized we can figure out if the time we spend moves the needle or if it is just contributing to a whole lot of sweet nothing.
In summary, standardize what work gets done and how it's visualized. Be careful not to standardize too narrowly on the how.