Little’s Law and Working Smarter

This concept, introduced by this episode of Fixable, has brought together some of my favorite things: mathematics and working smarter.

What I love even more about this concept it that is gives further support to what I believe is a hard truth for many to swallow: a leader is responsible and accountable for their workers’ performance. If the team is underperforming, all the claims of them being lazy, unmotivated, unskilled are meager excuses for a leader’s inability to attract and nurture the right talent, incentivize strong performance, and manage the distribution and delivery of work effectively. A team’s flaws are a direct reflection and response to the leader’s weaknesses. If you don’t agree, fight me. 

Anyways, let’s get into it:

Little’s Law

Little’s Law is a formula that helps us understand the capacity of a system so that we can better allocate resources. Let me explains this with a tangible example.

Say we are a dev team. To determine the average number of tickets for tasks or bugs at any point in time (L), you multiply the average rate of incoming or outgoing tickets (µ) with the average time it takes to complete a ticket (W). In short, the formula is:

L = λ x W

Pretty intuitive – if you know the average number of incoming tickets and how long they usually take to resolve, you also know how many people need to be on staff to resolve these tickets in an acceptable timeframe.

What happens when work is not being completed quickly enough? Then you can adjust the formula to the following:

W = L ÷ λ

Now let’s look at the levers we can pull:

W – Average time to complete work

There are a few ways to increase speed and efficiency – automation, additional staffing, enhanced training, allocating tickets more effectively, and so on.

However, as I describe in this post on the Project Management Trio Trope – if we prioritize speed, we will either have to sacrifice quality or incur extra costs. Eventually we will reach a point where we have optimize W as far as we can without changing the entire business model.

L ÷ λ – The throughput of tickets / Average number of tickets

Restricting the number tickets entering and being handled by the system involves a worthwhile exercise in strategy: identify your current goals and only accept tickets that serve those goals. Refuse to work on anything that is not 100% mission aligned (which includes issues and bugs that threaten the day-to-day operations of the product as well).

If this does not reduce the number of tickets (assuming W is optimized), this is a clear indication that the strategy is not focused enough and it’s time to lean into addition by subtraction. What else can you get rid of to make things work?

My answer? Get rid of your entire backlog. If you have honed in on your main priority, once that goal has been achieved, the state of your product and company will be in an entirely different place from where you started. A backlog will only serve as an archive of what you thought was a good idea before knowing what you know now. Don’t fall into the trap of continuing with an out-of-date roadmap. Instead, take stock of the current state of affairs, figure out the new needs of the business, and identify the new priority.

So the next time you believe that your team is not performing to the level of speed and efficiency that you would like, apply Little’s Law to your situation and see where you need to improve.

Also, let me know if you would like me to talk it through with you – I’d love to brainstorm together.

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