The Time Thief O'Gram

Definition

The Time Thief O'Gram is a tracking practice that tags work items on a kanban board by which of the five time thieves touched them (too much WIP, unplanned work, neglected work, conflicting priorities, unknown dependencies), then counts and trends those tags over time. It deliberately measures causes of poor delivery rather than symptoms: common metrics like velocity (story points completed), bug-escape counts, or deployment counts "don't reveal very much about risk" because they describe outcomes, not the mechanisms that produced them.

In the Book

Section 3.2 introduces the tool with a wink at Clue ("Thief Unplanned Work did it in the kitchen with the knife"): each thief gets a color-coded tag on the board, and DeGrandis shows three visual variants — the original per-team Time Thief O'Gram (Figure 45), a congregated version comparing thieves' trends across teams week over week (Figure 46), and a balanced-scorecard rollup (Figure 47) that helps a team decide which thief to attack first. The explicit audience is executives: she reports that CIOs consistently want two things — "less risk and more predictability" — and argues the Time Thief O'Gram is a more honest way to give them that than a status report, because it shows exactly which named cause is stealing time and how much, tracked over time as a leading rather than trailing indicator.

Why It Matters

This is a template for turning any recurring, hard-to-quantify organizational complaint ("we're always behind," "things take too long") into a small set of named, countable, trackable categories — which converts vague frustration into an argument leadership can act on and a way to verify whether an intervention actually reduced a specific cause rather than just moved the symptom around. It generalizes to any domain plagued by proxy metrics that measure activity or output instead of the specific mechanisms causing loss.