HOW TO: Limit WIP #7: Understand Your Customers

In this series, we’ve been discussing the psychology of your work, the sized of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who / what might interrupt us.Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers. When we do something, even if it is simply relaxing, there is a potential beneficiary of that task.We do things. Those things we loosely call “work”. “Work” has a “work product”. “Work products” should have some value for somebody. That somebody is the customer.Customers can include:

• those paying money for the work (the traditional customer)

• our bosses (corporate hierarchy)

• colleagues, coworkers, partners (corporate culture)

• regulators or agents of an authority (bureaucracy)

• family (family)

• friends and neighbors (society)

• ourselves (ourselves)

And there are likely other customers and subdivisions of these customers.If you are doing things that have no value to anyone … why are you doing them?To limit our WIP, we need to make sure we are doing the right thing.But even if we know it's the right task, are we doing the thing right? To learn this, we must ask ourselves:

• What does our customer want?

• What is the highest value they can get from my work?

• Do I have time to give them that value?

• How much value can I get done in the time I have?

• Will that level of value be sufficient?

We often find ourselves saying “no” to that last question, but continuing to do the work anyway.When we know our work is going to be of insufficient quality, we tend to become aggravated. We feel annoyance at the task, at those who asked us to do the task, an ourselves for getting stuck in a situation like this. This annoyance increases the chance that our work product will be of low quality – making the work even more insufficient.If we didn’t want to do a good job, this would not be a problem.Since we do, there are five quick actions we should take when we understand we have a customer:

• Be clear about what they want – Yes, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you had to rework something because of a simple initial lack of understanding?

• Be clear about what is on your plate – No, sorry Miss Customer, you are not the only thing I am doing right now. I wish you were, but life doesn’t work like that. Here’s what I can realistically do.

• Get their feedback early and often – How soon can you show them an interim product? How quickly can you compare expected and actual progress? Earlier feedback = earlier delivery.

• Understand minimum and optimal deliverables – Minimum and optimum deliverables give you a range of success to shoot for. If you are always aiming for the high point, you will usually underdeliver.

• Work is a relationship – All work is a relationship between the person doing the work and the person receiving it. Communication (again as early as possible) helps both cement the relationship and ensure an appreciated delivery.

It's simple, if we don't know who it is for, we don't know what we are doing. If we don't know what we are doing, how can we limit our work-in-progress?

HOW TO: Limit WIP #6: Count The Bosses–Show the Work

It’s hard to limit your work-in-progress when your boss count exceeds your WIP limit.If you have a WIP Limit of 3 and 12 bosses, you may as well have one card permanently in your Personal Kanban that says, “Negotiate with Bosses”.That sounds funny, but it is true. Your bosses will always require explanations about why you are working on tasks that are unrelated to their work.Tonianne and I play a game with people regularly called “Count The Bosses.” The rules are simple…. you count your bosses.If you need more than a few fingers to count them, you know that part of your job is not only satisfying their demands, but also choosing which one to be attentive to at any given point-in-time.Your bosses are people who directly give you work. In a few days, we’ll have a post #7 which deals with understanding your customers. For today, however, we simply want a number … how many people are giving you work?Then ask these questions:

1. Do these people consult with each other before giving me work?

2. Do I feel guilty when I’m working for one when another has needs?

3. Am I punished for doing work for one boss over another?

4. Am I in the middle of their disputes?

5. Will they let me complete tasks before giving me another?

6. Do they allow me to complete my work in a way that works for me, rather than working in ways they think I should?

What we would like is have answers that give them the right to give us work, but give us the ability to complete that work in the best way we see fit.If your answers are not in this direction, it is useful to show on a Personal Kanban what is really happening. Then discuss this with them around the board. Do not just go talk to them, because neither of you will have anything physical to talk about. The goal here is to use the board as a mediator. We want the board to reveal how there is too much work-in-progress and that the work load itself is hampering your ability to complete things on time.Have your bosses watch this strangely silent YouTube Video. Let them know you, too, have an optimal WIP limit.

Limit Your WIP

HOW TO: Limit WIP #5–Throughput Analysis

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.

Pomodoro and Kanban for Greater Household Throughput

Better Kanban

Pomodoro splits for cleanliness

We’ve written before about the Pomodoro technique, which is (at its most simple) dividing your work into 25 minute chunks and having a bit of rest and recap at either end.I use the Pomodoro Daisuki plugin for Chrome for this. Pomodoro Daisuki is a hybrid Personal Kanban / Pomodoro app that lets you build quick and disposable Personal Kanbans to quickly get stuff done.But … it doesn’t stop there.We use LeanKit to manage work for Modus and Personal Kanban. That Personal Kanban looks like this:But I, like some people (not others, I know) tend to relax while cleaning things. So, I noticed that during my Pomodoro breaks I was usually cleaning bits of the house.So, in Pomodoro Daisuki, I built this second “attack the house” Personal Kanban. Nothing here is pressing. There is no “need” to get these done. I’d just like a cleaner house and this lets me see what could be focused on during the break. For me, I have a few minutes, and at the end of this rather mindless task I get the gift of a slightly cleaner house.Note that all of these are pretty tiny tasks – maybe 5 minutes long if I really slow down. But I’ve noticed that keeping this up and using it means that I work my way around to tasks I would ordinarily forget about. For example, “Change filter in the fridge” is in that done pile somewhere. That was a three minute task that results in clean water and a healthy fridge.Another thing I should note is that if I don’t feel like cleaning – I don’t clean. This isn’t a board to force me to clean. It’s a board to help me engage in productive, rewarding, and somewhat enjoyable stuff during my break.One last point … note that we are using two tools for two different purposes. Examine what your needs are and use the right tool!

Small New Years Projects (Cabana Kaizen)

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For those of us who might be sitting in a world of clutter, where a million small tasks have become one daunting one - I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START! - the only way out of that jungle is through.Since every journey begins with a single step - we can only begin by simply beginning. But that first step is usually the hardest.Homes are especially plagued by little tasks that never seem to get done. They mount up and all seem to be equally important or equally unimportant. Prioritization is difficult, and procrastination ensues.So, I propose the over-all New Year’s Resolution - This year, each month my house will be a little better.To do this, you can create a Personal Kanban for this specific purpose - or a swimlane on your existing board. They would look something like this:The steps here:1. Come up with 12 small, but noticeable projects2. Start with the smallest one3. Do one a month.That really wasn’t too difficult, was it?You’ll find, as I have, that keeping a board like this compels you (in a good way) to want to do many more than 12 of these small projects.Two things are important here:First, start small and stay small. Make incremental improvements that you and others can see. Don’t rebuild the house or put in new floors right away. Again, like in the last post, we are forming habits here. For Gary, the first task he’s taking on is finishing one that has been sitting uncompleted. Before making it a set of tasks - it was part of that daunting sea of blue tickets. Now, that project is alone. It’s manageable. And better yet, the cards are atomic - meaning each car is actionable on its own and in relative short time. If Gary is sitting at his desk in his home office working and wants to take a short break - he can go line up the cans of paint, judge how old they are and what’s needed and move the card. Having moved that one card, he’s now one step closer to getting that bit of existential overhead removed from his life forever.Second, keep that Personal Kanban visible! If you can’t see the Personal Kanban, it can’t remind you and it can’t reward you. If Gary doesn’t see that list of projects he won’t feel any more compelled to complete them than he did before the board. And if he completes tasks he can see that there is progress and will be more likely to continue that progress.We humans are very good at procrastinating - use the board to undermine this natural behavior and get the work done. Completed projects mean a prettier home and a better life. (And yes, relaxing can also be a goal on the kanban - it’s not about work, it’s about life.)