InfoPak 1 - Personal Kanban at the World Bank: A Case Study

Personal Kanban at the World Bank - Small Team Rapid Development View more documents from ourfounder.

This is the first in a series of Modus Cooperandi's InfoPaks. They are downloadable, and work like a narrative whitepaper. Think of them as graphic novels for business.In InfoPak 1: Personal Kanban at the World Bank, we discuss the experience we had leading a rapid development project at the World Bank, specifically, how visual controls work with small groups, and why they are preferable to traditional team management.This InfoPak is best read by clicking the “Full” button above.  It’s also designed to be downloaded to distribute to others.  We expect to post more Personal Kanban InfoPaks in the coming weeks. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Starting Is Easy, Finishing Is Hard

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A wise man once told me, "starting is easy, finishing is hard."This has been my struggle my entire professional career, but I would argue it started as far back as grade school. I've always had projects and tasks to complete and deadlines to meet.  I've tried multitasking.  I've tried listing A, B, C tasks in a Franklin Covey Day Planner.  It has been a lifelong struggle to find a tool or process that provides clarity to my chaotic, goal-driven life.As the manager of software engineering and project management teams, I've used kanbans in the past.  In those applications, I referred to kanbans as "information radiators."  Large billboards were strategically placed around the office so anyone could passively see the status of the current project.  Anyone could see what the highest priority was, what was currently being completed, and what was being delayed.  I believe the key to our successes was the ability to visualize our work.  Everyone knew exactly what they needed to complete and everyone else knew if it was getting done.  People were not allowed to go on to ancillary activities until their assigned tasks were completed.  This constant feedback loop was very powerful.You would think if it worked so well for my teams, for business purposes, I would use it for myself for personal purposes.  It took some time but I finally started using a personal kanban and I kick myself for not doing it earlier.In order to communicate my kanban to collocated teammates, I use a product called Zen by Enkari, Ltd.  It is a web-based kanban and does an excellent job.  It's simple, clean, affordable, and very scalable.  Having a web-based tool like this also allows me to review my kanban at home and not upset my wife by having a large whiteboard covered with post-it notes in the sitting room.  The other step I've taken is having a physical kanban at work.  It looks exactly like my web-based kanban, right down to the color of the post-it notes.  Anyone can see what work I have on my backlog, what I'm currently working on, or what I have recently completed.Despite my best intentions, I've always made managing personal tasks WAY too complicated.  To the contrary, using a kanban is simple and it allows me to focus on what is important.  I no longer multitask and get nothing done.  I now limit my work in progress, focus on the task at hand, and finish.

Sente and Gote in Personal Kanban

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Sometimes your relationship to work is initiative based, other times it is reactive.  This is simply the nature of work. It is normal, and nothing - not Personal Kanban, not GTD - is going to change that.In the game “Go” (“Weiqi” in Chinese) there are balanced strategic concepts for the natural ebbs and flows of taking the initiative or reacting to a change in a situation.  “Sente” is the term for the initiative, “Gote” is the term for being reactive.In English, we’d be tempted to equate these to Offense and Defense.  However, there’s a subtle difference here. The word “defense” has a few connotations we’d like to avoid when working. One is that you are on the defensive when you’ve lost control of something. The other is that the goal of your defensive strategy is to quickly regain an offensive strategy.This comes from the animal brain inside us all. Reaction is the gazelle taking flight when the cheetah springs forth. Reaction, for human beings, naturally caries a fight or flight response.In Go, Sente and Gote positions are perfectly acceptable at all times. There are Go Masters who can win a game and play almost entirely from a Gote position. The Sensei knows that reaction is itself an action.Why is this important?Life comes at you fast. The nature of personal work is that some days are quiet, comfortable, and predictable. They are yard work or cleaning the house. Systematic and reassuring. Other days your water heater explodes and covers your basement in water, steam, and destruction.Some days you are at work, methodically finishing up your report and other days you are surprised to get a report back with particularly nasty comments and an unrealistic deadline to fix it.On days like this we realize that life doesn’t always respect our personal goals. Mopping up water and pulling down saturated wall board isn’t helping us achieve our goal of learning Spanish. This makes us feel like we are on the English term defensive, and that upsets us.  We wanted to learn Spanish by Tuesday and now we have to wait.Well, this is why most businesses fail. It’s why bosses are cranky.  It’s why people don’t feel they get what they want from consultants.  It’s why that damn plumber is STILL HERE installing the dishwasher.Life is by its very nature chaotic. We’re lucky that it is predictably so, but it still does not adhere to our plans. Whether you are doing Sente or Gote work, the work needs to be done. The best way to assure rapid and effective completion is to look past the emotions of “defensive” and accept Gote into the attainment of your goals.What Personal Kanban seeks to do is visualize how your work is actually done. It actually accounts for exploding water heaters and other unexpected events because, over time, your throughput will reflect these.So, say you have 20 projects at home and they have an average cycle time of 4 weeks from conception to completion.  The mean time to completion though, might only be 2 weeks.  There were a few outliers in there that took 6 or 8 due to unforseen events.What you know from this is that you have a maximum of 8 weeks to complete a household project, it’ll usually be done around 2 and that 6 is a very safe number to promise completion by, with 8 being virtually guaranteed.  As you notice this, you can start to examine why those 8s are happening.I’d be willing to bet those 8s are projects that developed a defensive posture and were delayed due to emotional reasons. In short, they were shelved because they became too hard to finish. Well, those unfinished projects mount up and procrastination has a price. You now have a 2 to 8 week variance in the time it takes you to finish something around the house.So we can examine those projects. Are the 8 week ones just more complex? Do they involving cleaning? Yard work? Being outside when the chatty neighbor might want to chew your ear off? Are they perhaps even unimportant?When you find the commonalities in the outliers, you can then develop Gote strategies.  As I said, Go Masters are unfazed by adopting a Gote posture because there are deep and tested strategies for achieving victory from Gote maneuvers. Part of this is tactical series of moves that undo an offensive maneuver by your opponent, but the other part is mental. Reaction to events whether on the Go board or in life in general is natural.  Acceptance of this natural relationship calms the fight / flight response in our animal brains and allows us to quickly and effectively deal with the unexpected work. This reduces the time to completion, shrinks our cycle time, and eliminates outliers.Be calm, deal with the issues, reduce variance.

Cadence and the Personal Kanban

After teams use a kanban to help manage their work, they see that there’s a cadence to it, an underlying rhythm to work.  When a piece of work enters the group's workflow, how long it takes to accomplish a task, how work is handed off from one person to another, how each person creates value, how they pass that value along, and how it is declared completed.  

There’s a definite cadence to this cycle.

When this cadence is discovered, it can be fine-tuned.  It can be appreciated.  The cadence become reassuring, a reward in and of itself. The cadence represents predictability, efficiency, and a job well done.

This is the dance of business.

Personal work is more frenzied. The cadence is harder to detect. As individuals, we are interrupted more. We are less able to absorb discontinuities.

Working as a team is a sexy tango; working solo is a tap dance.

There is certainly a cadence to working individually, but it is less institutionalized than working in a group.  Over time, you find in tracking your own work more of a repertoire of rhythms to draw from at different times.

After having a personal kanban for about 2 years now, I find that I’m more of a DJ than a time manager. I string together tasks to work on during the day that are part priority, and part rhythm. For me, writing and bookkeeping simply do not go together, they create dissonance. So if I have a bookkeeping day, I balance it out by meeting a colleague for coffee or taking an enjoyable phone call. Bookkeeping, for me, is jarringly anti-rhythmic. I need the syncopation of discourse to smooth it out.

In groups, fine tuning the team’s cadence involves creating one nicely arranged flow though a predictable value stream. For personal kanban, it means being able to create flow from a relatively chaotic value stream.

Photo by Andreas Schepers