READY COLUMN: Breaking Out Projects

Kanban

Lots of tickets in our READY column make a jumbled mess. We’re not sure how close we are to completion or what ticket to pull next, Breaking your work into projects in the READY column lets you see both. You can sequence work (pull the rightmost ticket), see how many tickets are left in the project, and see what projects are ripe for rapid completion.You can also create better strategies. For example: Sunday can be the day to nuke the “CLEAN GARAGE” project.  But maybe Saturday is the day you look over the tickets and figure out what you need to get from the hardware store for both the CLEAN GARAGE and the RENO BASEMENT projects. One trip to the hardware store gets you a power washer, broom, and shelving for the garage and a drill and sledgehammer for the basement.Without having the tickets in orderly swimlanes, we instead would have a disordered jumble which is much harder to manage.This is the final post in the Personal Kanban Tips series.  You can read all the previous posts by clicking on the links below.DONE COLUMN: How Does Your Work Make You Feel?DONE COLUMN: Daily / Weekly ReviewPROMISES COLUMN: Make Good On Your PromisesTHE NEW STUFF COLUMN: What's Just Come In?READY COLUMN: Ticket Aging

READY COLUMN: Ticket Aging

Kanban

In our last post, we discussed a NEW STUFF column. In this post, we are being even more explicit, noting in our Personal Kanban how old tickets on the board are.We have seen, even on our own boards, that tickets can linger on the board for six months, eight months, even a year! That’s simply too much time.What we also see is that if tickets aren’t done within the month they’re put on the Personal Kanban, they probably won’t get done. You’re better off making a second board called “Things I might want to do some day” (What in GTD would be a “someday” task) and getting off the Personal Kanban.An easy way to see this is to make three or four swimlanes in your READY column, each labeled by month. Here you see the months are JUNE, JULY, and AUGUST. This shows us, at any point in time, what tasks are aging or maybe old enough to simply discard.It also lets us see, over time, the types of tickets we tend to put on the board but never get around to. That’s important because people are skilled procrastinators. If one of those old tickets is “schedule physical” or “talk to Uncle Louie” we know the ticket didn’t age out - we’re not prioritizing effectively.Watching tickets age tells us a lot about what we choose to do, what we choose to put off, and what we wish we could do but is never going to happen.Seeing that explicitly can teach each of us what plans we can make that will likely succeed and which will likely falter or never make it out of the gate.This is the fifth post in the Personal Kanban Tips series.  You can read the fourth post - THE NEW STUFF COLUMN: What's Just Come In? here.

THE NEW STUFF COLUMN: What’s Just Come in?

Kanban

Is your READY column filling up with tasks? Is it hard to figure out what’s new, what’s important, and what’s aging?One option to deal with this is a NEW STUFF column. This column holds exactly what it says: New work that has come in over the last few days. As new work comes in, simply place those tickets in the NEW STUFF column.One recommendation would be that at the end of the day or perhaps every Friday you move incomplete tasks into READY - keeping the NEW STUFF as fresh as possible. Once a month, you would look at your READY column and see what tickets have become stale.What we’ve noticed is that many tasks that wind up on our Personal Kanban are never actually completed, but they stay in READY for months on end. It becomes harder and harder to make sense of the work in the READY column because some of it is fresh and some is nearly moldy.My favorite example of this was I visited a team using PK and they showed me their board. They pointed at the blue, yellow, and pink tickets and told me what each meant.I asked, “What does the white tickets mean?”They told me there were no white tickets.I pointed at one.They laughed. It was a yellow ticket that was on the board long enough to be sun bleached!This is important, the goal of the NEW STUFF column isn’t to merely focus on new tasks, it is to help us see what tasks are fresh and when to clean things off the board.This is the fourth post in the Personal Kanban Tips series.  You can read the previous post - PROMISES COLUMN: Make Good on Your Promises here.

From Daunting to Done: Completing a Dissertation with Personal Kanban

I have never completed anything to date that was more complex, daunting, or onerous than completing my dissertation. From the first day of my doctoral program, I knew that the only way I could complete this monumental task was to break it down into small, manageable pieces of work, and then visualize and track that work over nearly three years.

I was familiar with LeanKit when I started my program as I had used it personally and professionally to manage my life thanks to PersonalKanban. Isn’t it funny that once you buy into a system, everything you see is in context of the system? Just thinking about my dissertation plan triggered a visualization in my brain of cards on a kanban board.

The first thing that any academic will tell you about this process is that it consumes your life. You may not be actively doing research or have your hands on the keyboard, but you are thinking about it constantly. The reason why I am telling you something that seems obvious is because it’s critical to illustrate how I constructed my board to manage the process.

Let’s talk about my board—it manages my life and has evolved over time. I have work related tasks and personal tasks in separate Ready/Today columns, and then a Doing column that shows my WIP. I have a WIP limit of 5. I have a Stuck/Critical column, a Waiting For column, and then the typical Done columns.

Branden's LeanKit Kanban Board

When I thought about breaking down my dissertation into manageable chunks, I used LeanKit’s Task feature. I had one card called Dissertation that stayed in my Doing column, meaning that my WIP limit for the last few years was actually 4 (not 5) as my ever-present dissertation consumed one of those spots. Then I built a task board with Ready, Doing (WIP limit of 3), and Done lanes that contained all of the subtasks. There were a total of 22 major work products that needed to be managed. The actual number of tasks associated with my dissertation was significantly higher than that, but these were the major projects that needed multi day/week management.

Breakdown of Dissertation Tasks in LeanKit

My dissertation followed the standard 5 chapter model (Intro, Lit Review, Methodology, Results, Discussion), with the second chapter was treated like a collection of 12 essays of 3-10 pages each in length. Then there are processes like Scientific Merit Review and the Internal Review Board that represented multi-week processes that had to be managed. I hired an editor to review my early work to make sure I was on progress. After committee review, you have to defend your dissertation which requires an oral presentation and Q/A by your committee. See what I mean by daunting?

Each of these items had a card that I moved from the task board’s Ready column, to Doing, to Done. After my last task card (return from Format/Editing and Publication Submission) was done, I moved the parent card from Doing to Done. You can’t imagine a more satisfying feeling than moving a card that you’ve been staring at for almost three years out of the WIP area of your board.LeanKit helped me keep my life sane throughout this long academic journey, and it can be used to help you as well. I would often build cards for projects, papers, or other deliverables too to make sure I was always on top of my time. Using LeanKit as a task management system can help you translate task management skills into your post-academic careers as well by bringing Lean techniques to your professional career.

Kidzban Around the Web #3

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Around the web people are sharing their experiences with Kidzban.  This is the third post in the series – Kidzban Around the Web.Maritza van den Heuvel writes from her Becoming an Agile Family Blog. She has written many posts on her experiences with both kidzban and Personal Kanban.  In her All Aboard post she describes "that there is no 'one size fits all' approach."She has used a kidzban right from her dining table.  She states "The most visible item in our open plan living area is the dining table."She has also used the fridge.  Maritza mentioned in her post "By the next weekend, I’d realised that the object which is most central to our lives is in fact the kitchen fridge. It’s the first thing you see as you walk into the kitchen, and all of us open it at least once in the morning, afternoon and evening. It also came with a ready-made metal surface and a myriad of magnets we could use for our cards."Maritza loves the fridge because "The further beauty of the fridge, is that it has natural boundaries that separate the Backlog (below the line) and Work In Progress (above the line). Work again moves across from the left (Next Up) to the middle (Doing) and eventually to the right (Done)."She even has a portable Kanban that she made out of a folder and pasted a poster board to. "So far, the mobile board has been my biggest breakthrough in personal productivity using Personal Kanban."Maritza has created truly innovative kidzbans with her family.  Her Teaching Kids Timekeeping with Kanban is one example.  She states "I had been toying with the idea of a non-linear kanban for over a year."  Her kids loved Harry Potter and "were already familiar with the concept of a clock that 'shows where you are' made the format of the clock a no-brainer."

Weasley Kidzban Clock

Maritza mentions how easy it was to involve her children in creating the kidzban while making it fun. "All you have to do is look around at what you have and use it creatively while involving the kids throughout. We made the clock in an afternoon, with an extra day for the choosing and printing of the photos."  The face was created by using the previous year's cardboard calendar.  Her kids colored the segments, and she wrote the activity names on poster board and her kids cut them out.  They are removable so that they can change easily if activities change or the time changes for activities and her kids chose their own photos to use on the arms of the clock.After using the clock for around a month Maritza concluded, "The kids are certainly having a lot of fun with it so far."  They placed the kanban "strategically" in a highly visual place - at the bottom of their stairs.  "....they have to pass it every time they go up or down. We now also have a new mantra to Check and Change....(the Weasley Clock)."  She also stated her kids are starting to form the habit of changing positions of their avatars and they are enjoying comparing each other's status.Be sure to stop by Maritza's Becoming an Agile Family Blog to read the All Aboard post and Teaching Kids Timekeeping with Kanban post in their entirety. Maritza is also one of the authors of the book Beyond Agile: Tales of Continuous Improvement.Photo 1: CreditPhoto 2: CreditThis is the third post in the series - Kidzban Around the Web. You can read the first post here and the second post here.