Author Archive for Jim Benson
Jim Benson helps people collaborate. He owns Modus Cooperandi, a consultancy that helps organizations achieve business goals through collaborative means - like kanban. He blogs at Evolving Web. Read his story of why he started Personal Kanban. Jim and Tonianne's book Mapping Work | Navigating Life. Personal Kanban for Life Effectiveness is due out Summer 2010.
Would You, Could You on a Plane?
As a matter of fact, yes. I boarded the first leg of my flight from Seattle to Hanoi. I had 19 hours of flying ahead of me. I also had a backlog, and no wifi. Agile Zen was not going to be useful for me. So, I opened Open Office Writer and made a quick [...]
Complex Lives Pt 1: Jessica’s Future In Progress
Ready –> Doing –> Done Life presents us with opportunities, and so we’ve no choice but to take on concurrent projects. Unfortunately they don’t always conform to that simple Ready –> Doing –> Done value stream. Last month I was in San Francisco giving lectures on Personal Kanban at Stanford and Keller. My host for [...]
The Priority Filter: A Tutorial
Prioritization is often even more difficult and daunting as the tasks that confront you. A priority filter in your Personal Kanban helps you determine what tasks are ready in your queue, and the order of importance they should assume. Click on the video below for a quick priority filter tutorial. Note: This video is best [...]
Urgent and Important: Incorporating your existing tools into Personal Kanban
We’ve devised Personal Kanban to adapt to any system you might currently use (unless of course your preferred system is utter chaos). The only two rules are visualize your work and limit work-in-progress (WIP). PK’s main goal is to get you to write things down and begin to watch how and what you complete. Last [...]
Boosting Productivity and Learning with Spikes
Is there something you don’t know? Almost everyday it seems we are faced with having to learn something new. Some of those things are trivial and easy to accomplish, while others are important and a more than a little daunting to master. There are some easy steps to make learning less overwhelming. On the Lean [...]
Multiple Projects & Threaded WIP: Using The Big Picture for Personal Kanban
The two rules of Personal Kanban: Limit WIP and visualize your work. The truth about personal work: it’s messy. So people with messy work have been asking me for: ways to create multiple Personal Kanban(s) with unique workflows, ways to manage the WIP of multiple projects in one kanban, ways to manage projects with different [...]
A WIP Workout: Pomodoro and Personal Kanban
Pomodoro is the workout: Personal Kanban is the trainer.
InfoPak 1 – Personal Kanban at the World Bank: A Case Study
Personal Kanban at the World Bank – Small Team Rapid Development View more documents from ourfounder. This is the first in a series of Modus Cooperandi’s InfoPaks. They are downloadable, and work like a narrative whitepaper. Think of them as graphic novels for business. In InfoPak 1: Personal Kanban at the World Bank, we discuss [...]
Retrospectives and Kanban Evolution in Action
Marc Bless has a great post about his personal scrum board evolving into a personal kanban. His personal retrospectives showed him a need to limit WIP, so he created a special section for WIP, while not losing track of his tasks awaiting the actions of others. Marc Says: After a while I recognized the repeating [...]
Recursive Kanban – A Visual Control for Rapid Knowledge Work
A visual control is anything that allows a group to see their progress, and understand its relative importance. To be sure, a kanban is a visual control, but there are nevertheless some limitations to it. The biggest limitation to a kanban is that it is linear. Work, especially knowledge work, is not always linear. At [...]
