The Six-Ball Juggle

Designing Better workflows

Summary (the Takeaway)

How do you:

• • Simplify the Project
  • Speed the Workflow
  • Improve Quality
  • Solve Resource Issues
  • Improve Morale
  • Prevent my biggest regret as a Parent

 Juggle fewer balls.

Do this:

• • Skeptically re-evaluate your assumptions about the requirements.
  • Be skeptical that your Six Ball Juggler's workflow is actually the best workflow.
  • Bring in Circus Experts, talk to Entertainment Experts, Talk to Peers.
  • Design your workflow for Quality
  • Design your workflow for Clarity
  • Design your workflow for multiple talent threshholds
  • Design your workflow to be sustainable

Here's the Powerpoint Presentation:   The Six-Ball Juggle (slideshow)

Where have I seen this personally?

• Design in Immersive Multi-disciplinary Environments
• Existing Subsurface Utility Management
• "traditional" Training Design
• Traumatizing Recreational Activities

Too many balls in the air at once

As our disciplines are increasingly intertwined with adjacent and formerly-distant disciplines and increasingly loaded wtih spatial data, our "event" work is increasingly required to integate into ongoing permanent lifecycle operations and mangement.

Where we were once asked two juggle two or three balls, we're now required to juggle six.

Or are we?

Here's the question and here's the takeway: 

• six balls need to be juggled, but do all six need to be juggled all at once?

The default is Yes, but is Yes necessary?

• The requirements state the balls must be juggled, implying concurrency. But do the requirements really require concurrency?
• Because we have a Juggling Guru who can juggle six balls at once.   She's pretty good, and the process looks very efficient.
• Our managers used to be able nine balls at once (and that's why they're managers).
• Our managers never juggled nuthin' (and that's why they're managers).

What are some of the problems with the Six-Ball Juggle?

The biggest problems with Juggling Six Balls

It requires a Six Ball Juggler

• there aren't many people who are ever able to do it
• few refine their juggling skills to the Six Ball level.
• Expert Jugglers get promoted out of juggling
• Expert Jugglers may simply tire of juggling and opt to go tame lions
• few Juggling Gurus are also very good trainers, few train at scale.

Further Problems with the Simultaneous Six Ball Paradigm

• The perception is that the process depends on innate talent rather than discrete steps
• The guru does a lot and decides a lot mentally and tends to document only the end result.
• A Culture of Oral Tradition (vs Documentation)
  • "It's easier to coach you than to buld 'training'"
  •  Documented Training is scaleable.  Documents are extensible to other purposes (Checklists, Review...
• Onboarding is complicated, rare, and unnecessarily excludes capable resources.

 Benefits of Reducing the Process

While your Six Ball Juggler is a talented freak, the process looks impressively streamlined.  It's quite the spectacle.

But...

• How is the actual quality?  
• How defensible is the conclusions/outcome?
• How is the paper trail / audit trail?
• How straightforward is the troubleshooting/forensics?

While your end result - your deliverables - may require six balls that must have been "properly" juggled, the design/work process does not have to be performed with six balls in the same juggle.

Two approaches:

• juggle in series and/or
• consolidate balls.

The key to improving an overwhelmingly complicated process is to reevaluate the assumptions and to design it to be simpler. 

Involve your software experts.  It's important to be aware of the newer integration/collaboration capabilities in newer versions of software.  If your gurus are crushed under deadlines, it's possible they are not aware of new capabilities within their field or applicable enhancements from adjacent fields.Have your guru design it for non-gurus rather than gurus only.  Have her design it for less experienced resources.  Have her sketch out the workflow that she'd find ideal - and that included offload the parts she hates.

 Get advice.  Talk to peers and experts.