All Entries in the "Primers" Category
Pulling in Batches – The “Today” Column
We don’t always pull one task at a time. Every day, cognitively, we pull in batches.
InfoPak 2 – Personal Kanban 101: Achieving Focus & Clarity with Your First Personal Kanban
Personal Kanban 101 View more presentations from Jim Benson. Modus Cooperandi is pleased to announce the release of its second Personal Kanban InfoPak. In Personal Kanban 101: Achieving Focus & Clarity with Your First Personal Kanban we discuss the essentials for getting your board started. Topics addressed include how to establish value stream, backlog and WIP, [...]
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 [...]
Starting Is Easy, Finishing Is Hard
A wise man once told me, “starting is easy, finishing is hard.” This has been my struggle my entire professional career, but I would argue it started as far back as grade school. I’ve always had projects and tasks to complete and deadlines to meet. I’ve tried multitasking. I’ve tried listing A, B, C tasks [...]
Sente and Gote in Personal Kanban
Sometimes your relationship to work is initiative based, other times it is reactive. This is simply the nature of work. It is normal, and nothing – not Personal Kanban, not GTD – is going to change that. In the game “Go” (“Weiqi” in Chinese) there are balanced strategic concepts for the natural ebbs and flows [...]
Cadence and the Personal Kanban
After teams use a kanban to help manage their work, they see that there’s a cadence to it, an underlying rhythm to work. When a piece of work enters the group’s workflow, how long it takes to accomplish a task, how work is handed off from one person to another, how each person creates value, [...]
Personal Kanban: Tangible Tasks Produce Prioritization
Planning and prioritizing is a wicked problem that has plagued humankind since time immemorial. – Corey Ladas Human beings want three things in life: sex, money and effective prioritization. There appears to be a logical and linear three-stage process of better prioritization as you become familiar with kanban. The process follows the three main characteristics [...]
Every Task is Sacred
One of the primary goals of a kanban is to make value explicit. When you spend your time doing something, the reward should be observable. Even if the task is vegging out, the reward is relaxation. You should engage in no task that is valueless. When a task does not provide value, it is considered [...]
On Time Sheets: Personal Kanban and Life’s Little Annoyances
Timesheets are a universal drag. No one likes them. Personal kanban can give timesheets meaning.
