When we think about limiting Work-in-process, we have to confront that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough, we have to know what we are limiting. We have to see what we are really completing.A very real danger for us as people is that we limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the most important task to pull next” without understanding the weights of types of tasks.We have tasks that might:
make us money
satisfy someone else’s needs
teach us something
provide us pleasure / opportunity to relax
gain us political favor / help avoid political disfavor
satisfy bureaucratic requirements
etc.
Depending on the situation, we will pick one of these over another. However, very often Tonianne and I see people favoring office demands over personal growth, emergencies over kaizen, and politics over family. This behavior creates new personal emergencies. If you ignore your spouse and your kids long enough, that has repercussions – the best of which would be that they feel ignored, the worst can be much worse.Back at the office, the emergency we are tending to right now is at the cost of other work on other project that, after it languishes for a while will also become an emergency. And the cycle continues.The sad truth is that quite often we create our own emergencies and, therefore, our own spiral into an emergency-centered life. When we reach this point, we say, “How can I possibly limit my WIP? Everything is an emergency!”
Emergencies Create Throughput Issues Create More Emergencies
In this video, we see the impacts of a workplace emergency. New emergencies are spawned at home and at work. The point here is not to say, “Don’t have emergencies,” but to understand how they can create an emergency cascade. If the person in the video would have hired a handyman at home and found even one person at the office to help him, his dilemma could have been avoided.The key here is balance. The tickets at the end of the week were all focused on the Desper Project, rather than on all of his goals. The more balanced the tasks are at the end of the week, the more balanced goal attainment will be. The visual cue of only red tasks let us know that new emergencies were brewing.When you are setting up your Personal Kanban, ask yourself what your goals are and make sure the stickies are designed to give you feedback on what you are and what you are not completing.