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

Is Your Project in Limbo?

Limbo is completion out of reach

What happens when we start a project and it is honestly overtaken by events?We start a project in good faith and then, because context changes, we have to set it aside. It’s work-in-progress, so what do we do? The project isn’t done, we will likely come back to it, but it could be weeks or even months before we touch it again.These projects Limbo projects - we are unclear when they will start again, we only know that we’ve started them and that they are no longer our priority.  We are moving the project from being active to being just another option that may or may not be exercised in the future.Some people who are, shall we say, really into their Personal Kanban will lose sleep over this. But one word of (hopefully) enlightenment - Personal Kanban is more about understanding our work than it is getting specific things done.So, we now understand that we have a project that is either in Limbo or getting close to Limbo.Ask a few key questions as soon as possible and with as many people involved with the project as possible:

1. Limbo Really? Is the project really in Limbo or are we simply being distracted by something else? (Make hard, but informed choices when interrupting a project).

2. Quick Payoff? Can the Limbo project be focused on and quickly completed? (Even if you greatly reduce the scope of the project, can you quickly realize some benefit from the work done thus far?)

3. Future Knowledge? If you are putting this on hold, what will you need to know in the future when you start up again? Write a note to your future self about the state of the work, why it is that way, and the location of any half-completed work.

4. How Could This Happen to Me? Be very critical of why this project was allowed to start, only to be abandoned. Abandoning a project is very expensive and very wasteful. Figure out why this happened and take steps to avoid it in the future. Limbos cost money.

Again, Limbos are going to happen. They happen to everyone. Since our contexts and priorities change, it would be foolish to expect that every project we start on will be completed. The goal here is to use the Personal Kanban to understand our work, recognize when a project is in Limbo, and to act responsibly.Seattle, WAPretty Awesome Image: http://ichigopaul23.deviantart.com/art/My-Limbo-Wallpaper-364369944

Dominant and Secondary Projects

At Modus we now have a posted, dominant project at all times.

Make dominant projects visible

We post it as a large sticky on the wall. This is the banner saying “If you pull something and have any choice whatsoever, pull it from this backlog.”

This giant kanban token conveys our current organizational focus and promotes completion of that project.

Only when something is completed, does Modus receive any value from it.

This is why long projects with cumbersome deliverables are so difficult for companies and the people in them: long projects require long wait times to realize value.

As the anticipation for completion builds and we meet the inevitable disruptions in schedule, we are disappointed. As we are disappointed, our desire to work, our culture, and the quality of our work suffer.

Providing a constant reminder with a visual control, not just at the standup meeting (which is not a visual control), of the day’s focus has helped considerably.

I’ve noticed that Urgent but not Important tasks like answering emails, dealing with texts, and impromptu conversations not only derail us from the task at hand, but also the day’s focus. I’ve witnessed in others and myself that when we’re interrupted, we often don’t go back to what we were working on, but onto another interruption. After an unexpected phone call, we might suddenly find ourselves checking e-mail.

It seems that any break in flow, breaks the flow.

The visual reminder of major focus helps return us to the day’s project.

This is the fourth post in the series - Are You Just Doing Things.  You can read the previous post here.

Written in Mesa, Arizona

The Kaizen Resolution

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If you are a typical New Year’s resolver, you’ve just taken on a large, daunting, personal transformation project. You want to lose weight or be nicer or play for the Celtics. Good for you!But if you are also typical you (a) haven’t been too successful at this resolution in the past and have recycled it (b) have good intentions but no plan and (c) are doing this entirely alone.We mentioned my 10,000 steps rule. I have lost track of it after a few years of doing really well, some years of going pretty good, and lately a few years of saying “Oh today I actually did it”. During the years I did really well, I was using an on-line tool called Walker Tracker and, together with my friends like Ed Vielmetti and Prentiss Riddle I walked the equivalent of Seattle to Phoenix by way of San Diego.When we all drifted away from the tool, I lost the community and, therefore, focus.This year, I am resolving the more amorphous “be healthier.” This involves three things: eat better, exercise more, and see friends. These are also amorphous. I cannot treat these like projects, but I can treat them as the focus of my Kaizen events. None of these things require undue coordination, but they do require focus.What is Kaizen? Kaizen, in its essence, is continuous improvement. It is an internal drive to constantly be making things better. I want to do okay this week, a little better next week, a little better the week after that.What I don’t want is to over-commit to something far outside my routine. Business does this all the time. They call it a “re-org” - meaning they are radically reorganizing the processes, structure, and culture of the company. They usually fail.Why? Because they’ve done so much change at once they shocked the system. In 1998, after a decade of being a vegetarian, I decided to start eating meat again. How did I do this? Well, I ate half a chicken. It was delicious. It nearly destroyed me - rather than introducing small amounts of meat into my system, I shocked it with a large amount of change it literally could not digest.Don’t do that.With Kaizen we want to make small incremental changes. In this case, we want to pick up new habits that benefit our New Year’s goals. For this, we can use our Personal Kanban. Let’s say that for these habits, we do two things:1. Remind ourselves of the habits2. Invent small, obtainable projects to get you there.So, we have a habits swim lane. Note that we’ve identified a bunch of habits we’d like to achieve this year in the ready column, but right now we’re just working on a few. While those blue habits are “in progress”, we have blue actions in our working kanban.So we see that we have in our swimlane “exercise more”. (Fitting that it’s in a swim lane). So here’s where life gets interesting. Our first task is to find an exercise buddy - someone with whom we can create some social pressure and some support to actually do this exercising. We find Jill, who's totally ready to exercise - but we find that she’s into hot yoga and not treadmills at the gym.After some discussion, we agree to go with her to hot yoga.If you had pre-decided that the only way for you to lose weight was with treadmills at the gym, you would have bought a lot of new clothes and shoes and a gym membership. Now, you are looking at the best yoga studio. You had patience, and looked for the best options.Remember, your New Year’s Resolution is a goal. It is an end state you would like to achieve. There are many paths to your end-state. If you over-commit to one particular path, you greatly reduce your chances of success. Flexibility - especially in something as fuzzy as a New Year’s Resolution - is vital.Set yourself up for success. Build habits naturally. Don’t force change, but embrace it.

Mozart’s Record Store: Personal Kanban Anti-Pattern 2: Only One Value Stream

 I will not be accused of burying the lead here and say right up front:

Your Value Stream Is Wrong

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And it always will be.This is a good thing, as we work from day to day the steps we take to complete work subtly or even violently change. When we move from home to work to a special project, there are subtle and important differences to how we do what we do.Today’s anti-pattern is is painful to watch. When people fall into a certain way of visualizing their work or a certain value stream, it becomes comfortable to them. So comfortable, in fact, that they are reluctant or downright resistant to change or improve it. They then flounder in increasing painful work because their value stream doesn’t match their actual needs.Let’s say for example that Mozart is the manager of a record store in Bavaria.  He has three main types of work over a given month. One is order new stock from a variety of suppliers. The second is make sure the books are in order. The third is … everything else.Everything else is actually easy - even though it may be rather chaotic at times. We visual this type of work with a standard Personal Kanban value stream of READY | DOING | DONE. The work is going to be varied and extremely task-focused. Each of Mozart’s tasks is its own element of value. The best way to manage this work, to weigh these options, and to get these tasks completed is in a model that accepts the complexities and inherent chaos of day-to-day work.However, in other more project centered types of work, he may get more from value streams geared toward tracking of that specific work or project.For example, when ordering stock, the ideal world would tell you that orders are placed and received each month at set times. Mozart’s store has a mix of goods provide through suppliers ranging from large vendors to one person in their basement. Order responses are highly varied, leaving Mozart having to track not only the rate at which inventory is sold, but also the average response times for ordering popular items.So here we see Mozart’s order processing kanban. The value stream is quite specific to the value created. This is repeating value created in a fairly predictable way. If Mozart was only using the READY | DOING | DONE value stream for this type of project, he would have dozens of tasks polluting the rest of his work. The stages in these value streams may not actually be tasks. So, say he finds it’s time to order a new set of Buddha Machines - so he contacts the people in China via email. When he does that he can move the Buddha Machine ticket to ORDER.  A few days later, they might send him a letter saying, “We received your order and will get to it soon.” Mozart can then move the ticket to CONFIRMED - even though he really didn’t do any task himself. The point here is that there is new useful information about the state of the Buddha Machine order. A few days later, he gets an e-mail saying that the Buddha Machines have shipped. Mozart again can move the ticket.From time to time, new tasks may appear in Mozart’s regular Personal Kanban that say things like “Order new AxMxAx album”. At that point, when Mozart does do the ordering, he will move that ticket to done, but also start a new ticket in the order processing kanban.So, here we see that Mozart’s work can have more than one value stream.Now, let’s say this works for Mozart for a while, but he begins to notice that even after he receives confirmation many orders are not shipped.  Tickets start to back up at the “ordered” stage but don’t progress beyond. Mozart can then come up with ways to fix that problem. For example, he could insert a “remind vendor” column that he can move tickets to if they aren’t shipped in less than a week.Mozart must change his value streams to meet his needs. So must we all.