5 Ways to Work Down Your Backlog

Between my time as Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and my years as a crisis engineer, I have become something of an expert in ending backlogs. Many things can become backlogged: customer support requests, applications, claims, bug reports, and user stories, to name a few. Here are five strategies for working down, and ultimately eliminating, whatever backlog you’re facing.

1. Define “backlogged”

Surprisingly, this step is often skipped in the panic to resolve a growing pile of work — but if you don’t define your backlog, you can’t ever end your backlog. Even if you make monumental progress, you’ll still find yourself arguing over whether or not you are “done,” burning significant resources in the process.

This definition doesn’t have to be complex mathematics, but it has to be one that everyone agrees on, and that can be objectively measured. Factors to consider in your definition include:

• Timeframe. Items must be over X hours or days old to count.
• Duplication. If one customer submits 7 different support requests, those are 7 requests. If one customer submits the same request 7 times because they never get a confirmation message, that’s really 1 request. You may be able to de-duplicate items across a multi-step process.
• Missing counts. Someone who mailed in an application a month ago is probably mad about not hearing back, but if you haven’t yet opened that piece of mail, it might not be counted at all. I’ve used creative measurements like “pounds” of unopened mail to capture missing backlog counts.
• Perception of end users. You can say a claim has to be more than 90 days old to count as backlogged all you want, but if your constituents are calling the media and their elected officials by day 30, your definition needs to be adjusted.

2. Make a process map

Follow real items — bugs, requests, claims, etc. — through the process from start to finish and draw a detailed map. This only works if you follow real items; in my experience, following a practice manual or talking to employees in the abstract about their work misses huge and critical information.

3. Measure each step in the process

Over your map, start identifying data points at each step, such as:

• How long it takes to complete
• How many employees are assigned to it
• Error rate
• Item volume
• Wait time

4. Identify the biggest bottlenecks

The most successful backlog interventions usually involve the Pareto Principle — 20% of the interventions can generate 80% of the improvement. To find such interventions, flip this on its head: What is the biggest source of delay, time, cost, or other pain points? What could dramatically improve just that step? Spend time brainstorming this both with the people who are in the weeds of that work (who often have great ideas that no one has listened to before), and people with completely fresh perspectives.

5. Pilot an intervention for a top bottleneck

Depending on what you identify as the biggest contributors to your backlog, you want to pick and prioritize an intervention that stands to materially shorten or reduce one of them. You should have a clear hypothesis of how the intervention will make a difference, and don’t under-estimate simplicity. I’ve seen this play out many times, and this is not the time to deploy cutting-edge technology or artificial intelligence — instead, this is the time to simplify a complicated policy, expand straightforward automations, and/or create an online form/status tracker. Make sure you have a way to clearly measure whether the intervention is having its desired impact.

Marina Nitze, co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy, is currently a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis engineering firm that specializes in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina is also a fellow at New America’s New Practice Lab, where she works on improving America’s foster care system through the Resource Family Working Group and Child Welfare Playbook. Marina was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education.

Photo by Tim Johnson on Unsplash