The Subproject Approach to Personal Kanban in Detail

The Subproject Approach

Problematic for personal kanban is that its task-based nature undermines lean’s value-tracking goals. Kanban, not even personal kanban, is not a to-do list.  Personal kanban tracks tasks because that’s primarily how individuals measure work and value.

Your personal kanban can have multiple swim lanes, and they in no way need to be coordinate.  A task based swim lane can rest above one or more subproject swim lanes with a full value stream.

This allows you to see your current work simultaneously in both a task view and a project view.

The more you can move large projects into work-flow based subprojects, the more control you will have over them, and the more insight you will have into their flow.

You have some choices with the subproject approach when its combined with the personal kanban.

Roll Up: The subproject approach can be a roll-up task, tracking the progress of the large project while individual tasks still move through your personal kanban. This lets you see how quickly value moves through your subproject when you are working on other things. Here the roll-up task is the purple ticket that refers to the subproject.

Active Engagement: The subproject is actively used as part of your WIP. If the nature of your work is that you are paying even small amounts of attention to the subproject each day, making tags in your subproject part of your overall WIP may be more honest. This conceptually integrates all your subprojects into your daily routine.  This integration could lead to more meaningful introspection.

In this photo, there are 5 tasks in the WIP.  Three are in the top part of the kanban under “doing”, the other two active for me personally would be under “pre-writing” in the project area.

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