Finding Our Own Value - Growing By Understanding

Tracking Learning, Creating, and Health

There are those days where your Personal Kanban is on fire. You are in a state of flow and tickets are just moving right along. The days go by and you look at your DONE column … it’s full. Really really full. The DONE tickets seem to swim. There are so many of them. You’ve been productive, but what might all that work actually mean?A few weeks ago I started a side experiment. By hand, each day, I wanted to see what the actual impact of my work was … on me.What was I getting from the work I was doing? What was I learning? How was I making sure I was becoming healthier? Was I stuck in the productivity trap and not growing ... not being truly effective?Each day I gathered my Inputs, Outputs, and Maintenance, which is an overly technical way of saying:

• What did I learn today?

• What did I create today?

• What did I do to make sure I stayed healthy.

Reading List in Personal Kanban

LEARN: In the first four days we see here, we see both talking to clients and reading made up the bulk of inputs. Almost immediately this section paid off. I noticed that I specifically set aside time to start reading Humble Inquiry, simply so I’d have something to put in the block. Since starting this, my reading radically shot up, due to this one simple adjustment.CREATE: Creation was anything for work or otherwise, so we have writing proposals, recommendation letters and even sous vide ribs. The question wasn’t necessarily what made me money, but what did I create that kept me … well … creative. MAINTENANCE: Since starting this, I was taken down by a nastylittle bit of pneumonia, but we can see here that from the outset I started walking (a peak of 13.2k steps and 81 floors that week), that I’m talking to friends, and that I’m scheduling needed doctors visits (hard to get time to do when you travel a lot).RESULTS: Immediately, visualizing the very loose goals of simply learning, creating, and maintaining created tickets on my Personal Kanban board, changed the way I organized my day (to allow for frequent short walks), and got me to focus each day on a balance of learning, creating, and being a whole human being.  Shortly after putting the books I was reading on our board, Tonianne added the book column on the right to our shared board.Why is that important? Because my starting to do this was due to her putting, out of the blue, reading time into her Personal Kanban.  She had simply put that she was reading Deep Work on the board. That got me to thinking about what I was reading and one thing led to another. She made a little improvement, I ran a little experiment, she made another little improvement.Meta-Lesson: When we visualize for ourselves or others, new information is created. When we expose ourselves or others to new information, improvement opportunities are exposed.

Kidzban Around the Web #2

Around the web people are sharing their experiences with Kidzban.  This is the second post in the series – Kidzban Around the Web.Joseph Flahiff introduced Kanban to his daughters on a Saturday morning when they had guests arriving at 2pm, and they needed to get chores done before their guests arrived. Joseph states in his Saturday Chores with Kanban Part I  "Normally the girls choose all their chores before they start."  They were previously using a chores list set up in an excel program.  On this particular Saturday he decided on introducing a Kanban board.

KIdzban Saturday Chores

Take a look at this wonderful video below where Joseph interviews his daughters - JoHanna and Jillian. They discuss the few bumps in the road they encountered and how they tackled their challenges together and why they'd like to use the process again. Joseph's daughter JoHanna mentioned "There will still be some bumps but not the same ones because we've learned from our mistakes.""Working with a list we never really felt like we were working together.  We felt like competitors instead of teammates." - JoHannaThe next Saturday, Joseph's entire family got into the action even his 3 year old daughter Joy completed tasks on their Kanban.  The Saturday Chores with Kanban Part II highlights another wonderful video below where the girls discuss how they worked together and broke up the chores into smaller tasks so they weren't so overwhelming. Team work is personified when you hear how all three daughters managed the task of vacuuming the master bedroom together.When asked what her favorite part of using the Kanban was Jillian stated "The achievement of finishing a chore."You can read and view Joseph's Saturday Chores with Kanban Part I and Saturday Chores with Kanban Part II in their entirety by heading over to his WhiteWater Projects blog.Videos and photo credit: WhiteWater Projects Blog.This is the second post in the series - Kidzban Around the Web.  You can read the first post in the series here.

The Pen: Managing Stalled Tasks

This question is from an interview I just did with an internal magazine with ExileSoft, a Sri Lankan company. The question has been haunting me, though, so I’m extending my reply in this post.

Thushara’s question:

“I started to practice Personal Kanban. But I got stuck at some point.  I ended up having too many tasks in the “Pen” which never moved.  (This interview was a good example. It was there over 9 months). What should I do?”

Answer:

The Pen

When we first created THE PEN to allow us to sequester tasks delayed by forces beyond our control, we realized that it ran the risk of becoming a sinkhole - a place where work would fall never to be seen again.Here we see a kanban with a THE PEN column. The ticket in there says “Schedule Plumber”. If we didn’t have a column like THE PEN our DOING column would quickly become mired in work that wasn’t complete - but we could not work on.So THE PEN is necessary in Personal Kanban, but, as Thushara has found, it doesn’t stay looking nice and neat like this for long. It fills up with every promise someone has ever made to us and we’re left with the visual record of eternal repeating disappointment.Okay, maybe it’s not that bad.But, for us, half exercised options (which is what a half-done task is) are unacceptable. So, we have a few rules of thumb:MAKE THEM ACTIONABLE: Items in THE PEN should either be obviously waiting on work by others and have born on and revisit dates. When you move something to THE PEN, note when it went in, why it is there, and when you should revisit it.FINISH BEFORE START: Always look at your Pen before your pull a new task. Clean your house before you buy new things.WIP LIMITS: Set limits on the Pen – both for age and for number of tasks. When you reach a limit, you need to place concerted effort in getting rid of those tickets.ASK WHY: If you see tasks backing up ask yourself  “Why are these in THE PEN?” Because, you know what? If you didn’t have the Personal Kanban … it would still be stuck. You’d just forget about it over time. So, is it in the pen because it isn’t relevant anymore? Is it there because a project didn’t get finished?ACT:You need to act on those tickets. You can do one of the following:

1. Nothing – If you are honestly waiting on someone and there is nothing you can do, then leave it in THE PEN.

2. Refresh – Contact the people on the card(s) and remind them that you are waiting

3. Escalate – If there is an escalation path (someone to involve of higher rank to increase the urgency of the task for others) bring them in. If there is not, contact the people who are holding up the work and make the ticket’s value for you very clear to them.

4. Push – You have a pull system but others do not. If a card is stuck simply because others are procrastinating or don’t care – take the card to them and work it off your board.

5. Recategorize – If this task is not waiting for a person to do something, but for an event to happen (like a trade show or a deliverable deadline) that is forseeable and in the future, declare this task done and make a new ticket for follow up at that later date which can go in your backlog.

6. Kill it – If the option value for this task has expired or the coordination costs are too high, you can decide that ticket is done and contact the people letting them know you’ve had to kill it.

Multitasking and Bottlenecks: Why Limit Your WIP III

A Stanford study recently suggested that multi-taskers made very poor multi-taskers.Does that not make sense?Well, the study found that self-identified multi-taskers ended up people who were merely justifying a scattered lifestyle. Perhaps they felt productive because during a day they touched so many different tasks – but when actually tested against people who focused on one thing at a time, the multi-taskers lost and lost big.Why was this? Well, it was the Zeigarnik Effect writ large.Eval Ophir, one of the Stanford researchers, puts it like this in a Stanford News interview:

"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."The researchers are still studying whether chronic media multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or are damaging their cognitive control by willingly taking in so much at once. But they're convinced the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could."When they're in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they're not able to filter out what's not relevant to their current goal," said Wagner, an associate professor of psychology. "That failure to filter means they're slowed down by that irrelevant information."

The Right Environment for Success

Our environment directly impacts our ability to think. Just like our movie example, when we are overstimulated we lose focus on particular things and place it instead on the transitions between the things.We are constantly in a state of processing change. “Now is different than a few minutes ago.” That’s an expensive transaction that we’ll cover in the context switching section.When people talk about multi-tasking, they head for context switching first, but here let’s focus on some societal costs for multi-tasking. Let’s talk about a high multi-tasking environment and what that looks like socially.In fact, let’s talk a little more about Eldred from yesterday's post.  Here’s Eldred’s calendar.Project A – 10% time – Project Manager: GlennProject B – 15% time – Project Manager: IggyProject C – 25% time – Project Manager: Crazy LarryProject D – 10% time – Project Manager: LucyProject E – 10% time – Project Manager: ArminWith 25% slack time, Eldred should be on easy street. If only Glenn, Iggy, Crazy Larry, Lucy, and Armin all lined up and just needed things from Eldred in succession. But with each project having project demands, we can now bet that Eldred is spending a lot of time in meetings. We can further bet that some of the meetings are unproductive status meetings so people can know where Eldred is in his work.While Eldred is actually working, everyone working all five projects is now a tactical nuclear missile aimed directly at Eldred’s productivity. In one project, where we have a team of 10 people, there is a certain percentage of Eldred’s time that would be spent talking to team members, coordinating, and just answering questions. Now, Eldred has 5 times the team members, 5 times the bosses, 5 times the products, and 5 times the customers.Now, I’m not going too far out on a limb and saying that time is finite. Eldred only has so many hours in the day.These interruptions and meetings are not neatly scheduled. Eldred will be fielding questions from projects A and C at the same time. Crazy Larry will pull rank from time to time, saying that Eldred’s not giving his full 25%. The other project managers will feel like Crazy Larry’s project is getting attention at their expense. This will cause more meetings to figure out “resource utilization.”In the end, the company will start to hire contractors or temp workers to fill the apparent short staffing needs. Yet, since Eldred is now the guy with vital information for all five projects he stays on all five projects.

Tastes Like Eldred-berry Wine

Eldred is not only overburdened, Eldred is a bottleneck. Our over-stretching Eldred has caused the slow down of all five projects. Hiring more people, just put even more pressure on the bottleneck – without addressing the root cause. Eldred has even more people to interact with now.Again, Eldred is a Bottleneck because he is multi-tasking.When we multi-task, we reduce our capacity. When there is an element of reduced capacity in a system, the rest of the system slows down.In manufacturing there is a concept called “Takt Time” this is the minutes of work necessary to complete a unit of value. When we overburden Eldred, he slows down. Then, the teams he is on slow down as well. The overall takt time decreases – the project slows down. Value production slows down. Frustration mounts.

Solving Eldred’s Dilemma

This particular issue is easily solved. Take Eldred off at least two of those projects.Does that have impacts on the rest of the company? Yes.Does it mean that Eldred may have more slack time than we’d like? Maybe, but I doubt it. It more likely means that Eldred will be more focused on the remaining projects. Their budget may need to go up as a result, but the projects are more likely to be completed sooner and with higher quality.This is post 3 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP.  Read post 4 Context Switching: Why Limit Your WIP IV in the Why Limit Your WIP Series.  Also see the index for a list of all of them.

Kaizen Camp: Personal Kanban Conversations Happening Worldwide

Kaizen Camp

The Kaizen Camp in Seattle was such a success that people around the world and sponsors have requested more and more.So, we've launched Kaizen Camp as its own entity.We now have them scheduled for New York, Los Angeles, and Boulder. Tel Aviv, Sydney, Melbourne, and Saigon are in the works.We're excited to talk about continuous improvement, Personal Kanban, and Lean with a global audience. Come join us!If you don't see your city and want to bring Kaizen Camp to you, please visit the site and let us know. We're building out a 2013 schedule!