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Work Log visualizes the various activities of your team. Knowing which work patterns to avoid and which to aim for helps teams improve their health and development speed.
Unhealthy patterns
Working alone
People tend to gravitate to working on their own things because it's easy and doesn't involve coordinating with others. However, great teams are built upon collaboration and sharing knowledge.
Look for epics, stories, or tasks where you can only see one contributor. Could they use a hand?
Being able to work on the same feature sets the bar higher for planning because you can't figure things out as you go. This is generally a good thing: better planning reduces wasteful rework, but it can feel painful at first.
Siloed work
Another form of siloing is when some people always gravitate to working together on the same features or when someone is stuck only fixing bugs or reviewing code.
Look for patterns in which individual contributors are only working on one kind of thing. In the example below, the bottom contributor is mainly reviewing code instead of a balanced mix of commits, pull requests, and reviews.
Too much reactive work
Housekeeping work is important to ensure the team's capability to deliver on roadmap work. But if priorities and focus are unclear, or the team is fighting fires, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds of ad hoc work.
If the work log is bottom-heavy with lots of reactive work (eg. bugs and tasks), try to correct the course by focusing more on high-impact stories and epics.
Is there a lot of bug-fixing work, and work that's not linked to any issues?
Multitasking and days without progress
We're encouraged to stop starting and start finishing, but something urgent always comes up. Even short disruptions can impair flow, and context switching is expensive.
Is the team getting interrupted or working on too many things at the same time? Or has the team a habit of creating larger commits and Pull Requests?
Healthy patterns
Team collaboration
Issues that the team collaborates on are more likely to be completed faster and are usually more fun to work on due to social interaction, knowledge sharing, and quicker reviews.
Look for stories with a high amount of collaborators, and continuous delivery (commits happening regularly every day).
Plan for collaboration (eg. when breaking work into tasks) to increase the odds of collaboration.
Increasing focus on the biggest priorities
Limiting the amount of work is another way to increase team collaboration, and complete batches of work faster. This helps drive focus which ensures the team can progress in their most important priorities.
Again, ensure the stories get continuous progress and little to no empty days.
Additionally, look for a step pattern. If there is one, the team transitions well between stories and takes the time to finish work before jumping on to the next topic. Learn more.
Sometimes it can be easier to analyze the step pattern on the high-level work log, where the work is aggregated on the weekly level.
