I love this book—Dominica DeGrandis talks about the chronic problems we all have in knowledge work and technology work in a way that is breezy, familiar, and often irreverent, but also shows off decades of learnings and concrete techniques we can quickly adopt, both at work and at home.
Gene Kim, researcher and author of The Unicorn Project, The Phoenix Project, Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook
The most practical book I’ve seen on making processes lean. Dominica’s deep experience coaching companies is fully on display as she walks the reader through a series of exercises to find waste and eliminate it—or, in her terms, to catch those sneaky ‘time thieves’ in the act. Read this on a Sunday and you’ll want to start trying out the exercises on Monday!
Mark Schwartz, Enterprise Strategist at AWS, former CIO of USCIS and author of A Seat at the Table
It is about time someone addresses time theft (aka the perfect crime) head on. Not only does Dominica provide a lot of the why behind the forces that cause us to make bad decisions about our time, she also provides ideas of what to do about them. I wish I had this book when I took my first management job!
Julia Wester, Lean Consultant and Blogger at EverydayKanban.com
Many of us wear our busyness as a badge of honor. In Making Work Visible, Dominica DeGrandis shows us how we can make hidden work-in-process visible, to clearly see the effect it has on our ability to get things done. Once we can see it, she dives deep into the hidden aspects of our WIP that steal our time, energy, and productivity, along with strategies for combating each of them. Making Work Visible helps us to take a step back from all that busyness and really see.
Chris Hefley, Chief Revenue Officer, Retrium
Today’s workers are drowning: nonstop requests for time, days filled to the brim with meetings, and endless nights spent heroically fixing the latest problems. This churn and burn is creating a workforce constantly on the edge of burnout.
In this updated edition, IT time management expert Dominica DeGrandis reveals the real crime of the century―time theft, one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations.
Through simple solutions that make work visible, DeGrandis helps people round up the five thieves of time and take back their lives with time-saving solutions. Chock-full of exercises, takeaways, real-world examples, colorful diagrams, and an easy-going writing style, readers will quickly learn effective practices to create high-performing workflows within an organization.
And now, with this updated second edition, readers will get more exercises plus a new afterword from the author featuring new learnings from the past five years.
The technology world―and indeed the whole business world―is moving at a pace faster than ever before, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Instead of consigning ourselves to the pressure cooker of the modern world, it’s time to elevate how we work. It’s time to level up our game. It’s time to make work visible.
What's inside
Five Time Thieves — Learn about the five thieves of time, how to spot them, and how to overcome them by making work visible.
Proven Methodology — Discover the proven practices to create visible, outcome-driven workflows for yourself and in teams.
Easy to Use — This colorfully illustrated book includes artful diagrams, detailed exercises, highlighted learnings, an index, and a glossary.
For Everyone — This is an exceptional guide to lean practices and better ways of working for anyone wanting to up their game.
Dominica DeGrandis is the foremost expert in Kanban Flow within the IT industry today. Her work has shown working IT teams how effectively improve workflow and optimize throughput to produce the best result throughout the value stream. Her passion involves the use of visual cues and transparency across teams and organizations to reveal mutually critical information. As Director of Training & Coaching at LeanKit, Dominica combines experience, practice and theory to help teams level up their capability. She blogs at ddegrandis.com and tweets at @dominicad.
