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.

PROMISES COLUMN: Make Good on Your Promises

Kanban

When we get overloaded, it is very easy to promise people work and then under-deliver. Promises are tricky, they bring with them social costs as well as costs for time and effort.

When I promise something to you personally, I am putting myself on the line. I am telling you, “because you are important to me, I will do this thing.”  If I don’t deliver, it is telling you, “I guess you really weren’t that important to me.”That was never my intent, but we all know when we’ve been waiting on someone and they don’t deliver, we lose a little faith in them. Worse yet, if it’s early in the relationship we identify them as a “non-deliverer.”Mea Culpa: I, personally, end up overloaded or in danger of being overloaded frequently. Many people place demands or expectations on me and I need to meet them. In many cases, I was making perfectly rational decisions to delay some work and do other work. While that was rational on my end, it was likely infuriating for others.Therefore, I started explicitly tracking promises to other people. This immediately had to impacts on me.1. My short term backlog and WIP shot through the roof. Seeing the promises explicitly laid out was stressful and illuminating.2. I stopped promising so much.3. I began to seriously consider each promise as I made it.

• Was the promise necessary?

• Could the goals of the promise be served with a less costly promise?

• Could the goals of the promise be served with more collaboration?

• Were there options to meeting the goals of the promise?

What I learned was that we tend to rashly promise the first idea that comes into our heads. We’re having a conversation. Something sounds like a good idea, like it’s needed, and like I could provide it. So … I promise it.That promise becomes a tacit social contract … I’ve promised something. You are counting on it, I need to deliver it. So, basically, I just contracted to do work for you without giving it very much thought.That’s a recipe for disappointment.So manage your promises by seeing them. A lot of obligations in the PROMISES column mean a lot of work that is very difficult to re-prioritize. That means you have work in your queue that won’t respond well to change. If you have an emergency arise, those promises don’t go away.This is the third post in the Personal Kanban Tips series. You can read the second post - DONE COLUMN: Daily / Weekly Review here.

DONE COLUMN: Daily / Weekly Review

Done column review

“When do I get tickets out of my DONE column?”People often allow their DONE column to get so full of work that it becomes useless - a huge pile of completed work. There are so many tickets in there, you no longer know what happened.If we’d like to encourage ourselves to empty the board weekly and get some interesting information at the same time, we can create a DONE column that tracks what we do daily. On Fridays or Monday morning, we review and empty our DONE. Now we have set up a system … last week is over and we’d need to clear space for the new week.We can take a look at the week, clearly see what we did, see what days were satisfying and what were not, and get an idea of what days were interrupted.  We can do a “retrospective” on the work and evaluate where we’d like to improve what we’re doing. We can also plan for the upcoming week.We can also see how much work we tend to do.  This is very powerful.  Looking over the board above, we see that we reliably complete about three or four tickets a day. This helps us set our expectations for what we can promise others. We know that a promise, any promise, that we make takes up about a third of our capacity for that day.Understanding that promises have a cost greatly helps us limit our Work-in-Process (WIP). We can see our daily output and limit what we are working on accordingly. It’s hard to say no to work. We tend to like what we do and the people we work with. Understanding how much we actually complete helps us say “No” to too much work.“I’d love to help you, but I’m working on these other tasks right now. Can I help later after I finish a few of them?”Your throughput (the number of tickets you do) may be 6, 8, 12, or more tickets a day - so don’t get hung up on the number in this example. The goal here is to find out what your number is, so you can choose work more effectively and not overload or over-promise.When you over-promise, you under-deliver.So, take a look at what you’re doing each day, review at the end of the week, and set realistic expectations for yourself and others.This is the second post in the Personal Kanban Tips Series. You can read the previous post - DONE COLUMN: How Does Your Work Make You Feel here.