Contents
5 reasons why Businessday (Scrum on a Kanban Board) works so well with Accounting Teams…
Understanding the Workflow
Need an intro paragraph or sentence here about workflow providing the conclusion.
Review your team’s value to your organization. Once you identify the what that value is or why your team exists at the company, then map the work as it flows through your team. This is called the workflow or the value stream.
As you map this work moving through your team you should notice that each player adds additional value to the work. This is called the value stream. Every player on the team directly or indirectly adds value to the work. Ultimately, it is this value that is being added to the work is why your team exists and why each player on your team exits.
For accounting teams the value they bring to an organization obvious. Activities from invoicing, posting cash, and collections to purchasing, paying vendors, to filing and scanning. Several of these tasks provide a clear direct value add to the company.
Allowing the entire team to see the entire team workflow is very powerful. The invoicing team might spend a few more seconds double checking and invoice if they know and invoice error could cause problem for their teammate in collections or attempting to pay a vendor.
Additionally, this process allows each player to see how and where they add value. Every player plays some important role on the team (even if its a supporting role), allowing them to see this value and how it fits into the bigger workflow and value stream provides each player with a sense of purpose.
People with purpose play harder. [research for this idea] Could quote Daniel pinks book.
Teams that don’t understand the workflow:
– Individual players typically lack purpose or don’t understand how their work fits in the entire team goal
– Break down of collaboration among team members working on sequential steps in a process
– Little or no coordination amongst players
– Little or no motivation for the complete the task well
– Players feel their individual contributions and role are not important
– Weak or little synergy
Visualization of the Work
Allow your team to visualize their working making both more tangible and manageable. Engage your team by engaging their visual brain.
Most office work is obscure and intangible (i.e. difficult to visualize). Consider these simple multi step accounting process:
- Upload payroll reports into the ERP;
- Check and confirm totals; and,
- Email ERP payroll reports by department.
OR
- Post end of the month accruals; and,
- Reconcile accrual accounts.
OR
- Confirm all monthly corporate expenses are posted;
- Calculate corporate allocation ratio by branch;
- Post allocated expenses to each branch’s income statement.
How do you visualize obscure office and accounting tasks? By making each task into a card and posting it on a board. Now when the brain sees the obscure task on a card it activates the visual brain making the work more palpable and tangible
– Karl Scotland (http://www.methodsandtools.com)
To make obscure work meaningful start visualizing it. This allows team members to create a mental model of obscure tasks making the tasks more interactive and engaging, resulting in more clarity and persistence. All of this results in the team providing more focus and energy to the most important tasks, essentially, you focus on what you can see. Interested in more watch Tom Wujec’s TED talk.
When the entire team meets and reviews the entire board together it will be clear how much work needs to get done and where teammates are struggling with road blocks or bottlenecks. The entire team can then see the problem and can help by focusing energy and attention on a solution.
Teams that don’t visualize tasks:
- Have difficulty focusing
- Lack engagement in the work and process
- Forget or miss tasks in a sequence
- Seem to lack clarity and difficultly communicating with others
- Difficulty identifying when teammates are struggling or bottlenecks
Managing Multitasking
Maximize your teams efficiency by limiting multitasking.
In today’s office environment multitasking has become the new normal. Job description of most offices jobs read, in part something like this, “must be able to work at a fast pace and good at multitasking”.
The research suggests that while humans can multitask, women better than men, (switch from task to task quickly, or task switching) the cost is a loss of efficiency. The American Psychological Association suggests that as much as 40% of productive time could be wasted due to multitasking. This magnitude of productivity loss may even occur with a few number of tasks. Gerald Weinberg in his article, Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking, suggests that adding a single task could cause a loss of 20% of productive time spent on a task.
Using a Kanban board allows teams to limit multitasking by allowing team members to focus on a limited number of tasks at once even if dozens of tasks are in queue. The the team members as availability to focus on another tasks, s/he pulls another from the queue and begins working. If work on a particular task is blocked, s/he can place the task back in the queue and pick another task. As work and time are available, the team member is responsibility to decide when they are able to give a task attention and focus.
Making task switching deliberate by using a Kanban board makes team members more aware when multitasking and task switching is occurring and they can work to reduce it.
Teams that use Kanban board and allows them to focus on limited tasks at a time and focus on getting those tasks done rather piling on more unfinished tasks. This changes the mentality of the team from “being busy” to getting things done.
Teams that don’t manage multitasking:
- Are always swamped but not productive
- feel burned out and overwhelmed
- Do not have any capacity for change or new tasks
- Inefficient
- Maybe slower than other teams with similar tasks
Create Cadence of Accountability
Daily stand up meeting help the team establish a cadence of accountability and communication. and it is difficult to have a successful team without the regular occur of both.
Dictionary.com defines cadence “the rhythm of events, especially the pattern in which something is experienced. Getting your team to in a continuous rhythm of accountability and communication helps establish reliability and dependable capacity and coordination amongst the team.
Published by FranklinCovey, The Four Disciplines of Execution research suggests that 81% of employees are not held accountable for regular progress toward the company goal. Accountability amongst teams is actually pretty rare, accounting the HBR article, The Best Teams Hold Themselves Accountable, if you want a high performing team peer-to-peer acceptability is a must.
By conducting daily Stand Up Meeting peer to peer accountability happens at each meeting as each team member accounts/reviews the following 3 questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What will I do today?
- Where am I struggling?
By holding the meetings at the same time and same place everyday, teams quickly realize that they will be held accountable daily for commitments they made the prior day.
Teams without cadence:
- – Unstructured and irregular team meetings
- – poor peer-to-peer communication
- – Lack of synergy amongst team members
- – Little or no peer-to-peer accountability
Continuously Improvement
Continuous improvement is the team’s desire and effort to continually improve by reviewing past cycles and periods and making changes to improve. This can be done by reducing errors, multitasking, bottlenecks, or idle time.
How idle team members add value or known as “Slack”
Asking the following questions
- Can I help progress an existing Kanban?
- Lack skills for an existing Kanban, find the bottle neck and work to release it.
- Lack skills for an existing Kanban, pull in additional work from the queue
- Can’t start anything in the queue? look for future lower priority tasks that can be investigated
- Nothing lower priority? look for other interesting work (creative or innovative which could benefit the team).
Teams without continuous improvement: