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Top 5 reasons why people take on more work then they have capacity to do | TopLeft - Kanban boards for Connectwise and Autotask MSPs

Written by Wim Kerkhoff | May 1, 2017 7:00:00 AM

Rotting Fruit

On the weekend I stumbled upon this YouTube video of how an IT Operations team used Kanban to improve their world for Project and Service delivery. Great ideas and different ways of looking at old problems. It’s about 30 mins long and includes a walk-through of a real life (sticky notes on the wall) Kanban board that they custom designed.

My favorite quote is “too much work, and work stated but not moving, is like rotting fruit: it’s expensive and smells bad!!”

The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coRx-onQ09Y
And their slickdeck is here: https://www.slideshare.net/ITRevolution/wednesday-415-dominica-de-grandis-gb-final

There is a lot of good info in it… it’s from a DevOps conference, and I think MSPs can learn a lot from the Agile/DevOps world. Here are two of my favorite slides:

What randomizes your day?

  • Conflicting priorities
  • Changing priorities
  • Interruptions
  • Context switching
  • Unable to meet commitments

Top 5 reasons why people take on more work then they have capacity to do:

  1. Hard to say “no” to people we like
  2. Don’t want to let the team down
  3. Didn’t realize work would take so long
  4. Fear from those in position of power
  5. People pleaser

Hope this was useful – let me if it was, or wasn’t…