Visualizing Interactions in Complicated Work

A construction team planning work openly and honestly.

When we look at a Personal Kanban, its simplicity belies its power. Visualizing our work as individuals and as teams and even as teams of teams creates trust, reliability, and understanding. When we want to co-ordinate work, these are serious prerequisites.

The image above is from a construction trailer, they are engaged in a Lean Construction exercise known as a "pull-plan". Each color is a different contractor, each diamond is a delivery or a milestone.  In this case we have five different contractors whose daily work relies on the completion of daily work done by the other contractors.To spell this out, their work directly relies on people in other companies--every day.Historically, this had led to predictable delays with different companies working at different speeds for different reasons. You might recognize this from different departments in your company or different people in your family. 

Our work often relies on other people who are often simply ignorant to our needs.Not surprisingly, when they are ignorant of our needs they don't give us what we need.

This makes it seem like they are "out to get us" because so often the work we receive is lacking. We attribute malice where the fact is those other busy people have different things to worry about every day and need to see their work in your context and vice-versa.The pull-plan concept takes this head-on by looking at the backlog of work (your options column) for the next six weeks and sees who needs to do what, when, and in what way in order for the schedule and budget to be met in a safe and quality way. 

The teams meet and on each ticket list each activity (option) they need to do to get their work done, the number of days the work requires, and then the trigger that makes that work happen (sometimes this is from another contractor, sometimes this is just their work progressing).

This allows each contractor to self-report how long they would like the work to take and then compare the total production time to the schedule and figure out what can be done the meet the customer's expectations. Often, very often in fact, this is simply having the contractors discuss with how they need the space prepared for a clean hand-off.

I've noticed almost all in-office conflicts and "culture problems" end up coming back to hand-offs, which basically means they come back to an understanding of what quality work really entails.  We need to ask some serious questions: Do I know how to provide you with work?  Do you know how to provide product to me? Are we talking to each other or past each other? Do we really understand how our individual work leads to a quality end-product?

Very simply, the image above has professionals come together, make visual what they need and when they need it, and then find the best path to mutual success. They learn quickly the challenges the other contractors have and get to inform them of their own. This makes many of those challenges lessen or outright disappear.

Consider, in your Personal Kanban or that of your team, that there might be opportunities for these kinds of conversations. Be open, be honest, and work things out.Remember: No one creates a quality product alone.   

Modus Institute

How Do You Handle Daily Tasks?

Daily tasks confound people.  How do I put them in my Personal Kanban? How do I visualize work that I do every day?  Many people actually make new tickets each morning and move them into Done during the day, adding to the monotony-not learning from it.Someone on Quora recently asked how to deal with 'Dailies'.  Here is my response:There are a variety of ways to do this in Kanban apps, even ones like Trello with few features.The design of your system will of course depend on several factors like:

• Are your every day tasks all or mostly all of your work?

• Are you the only one who does these every day tasks or are they shared?

• Are the every day tasks ones you learn from or are they … mindless?

• Are the every day tasks fully repeated or do they change with context?

• Do the every day tasks involve customers?

To answer the question for how I personally do it,I travel a lot, so I do use Trello.I have three inbound columns that track the High, Medium, and Low priorities of tasks I need done. (A priority filter).To the right of that, I have a column called “Dailies”. That has several tasks that require regular attention. Each day I’ll have one or two pomodoros that focus specifically on those tasks.Nothing special there.The trick is…turn your daily grind into something actually helpful.On the other side, kill your “Done” column and create two new ones.“Task Complete” and “Learning”.Especially from your Dailies, you should have some learning. How long it took, what the response was from the customer, ways to do it better, information it kicked back at you, etc.If you don’t learn from your dailies and they aren’t the reason you are there…delegate them.If you do learn from them, do it explicitly.When “Done” with a daily task, the marking of “Done” isn’t mindlessly moving a ticket to the right. It’s actually noting in the learning column what you learned that day, data you gathered, etc.General pro tip: If your work becomes mundane so do you. Make your dailies a growing experience.

Do More Things Right

I love to cook.  When I make good food and share it with others, they will take a bite and look as excited to eat it as I was to create it.  They might not understand the subtleties that went into it, but they understand the product. Satisfied eater, satisfied chef. When we do something and are happy with it, we get excited.  We want to show it to others. We are proud of what we’ve done and want to see the world interact with it.In the world of Personal Kanban, we teach that we want people to use their boards to see what is happening and continuously improve.  This doesn’t only mean that you look for everything bad and make it go away, you also look at what’s gone right and make sure you do more of that. Marcus Buckingham, years ago, urged us to build on our strengths, but right now team retrospectives and annual reviews focus on the negative.  “Improve” becomes synonymous with “how can you stop doing bad things.”That’s not improvement, it’s rehabilitation.It is popular now to look at “plus / deltas” after meetings or when something happens.  After witnessing about a million plus/delta exercises, it is clear that the only thing that’s improved are the deltas.  More often, however, there is no improvement at all. People go through the exercise and fill in the columns, then they leave.That’s not improvement, it’s filling in plus/deltas.While you are using your Personal Kanban, either by yourself or with your team, look at improvement opportunities like this… What can be improved?Pro tip: Improvement does not mean “fix”.Look for things that go well that you can improve to be the norm.  Look for things that don’t go well that can be improved to bolster things already going well. Look for things you can stop doing.When you find them, that’s not the end of the mission.  This isn’t merely discovery.Now you need to actually do things to improve.  That means making a plan for the improvement, figuring out what needs to be done, making the tickets for your personal kanban, and then doing them.  Doing them, in turn, means you have to Do Them. Make time for them, make the improvements collaborative (we’re more like to elevate an improvement task if we are working with others), and set a goal date for the improvement. Then measure and discuss the impacts of the work you’ve just done. Make the improvement a system to both complete and learn.Sound like work?  Maybe it is. But in the end, you get to do more of the work that is rewarding, work will be easier, and you’ll spend a lot less time complaining.  It’s an investment.

Learning to Climb: Metacognition is Freedom

Human beings are good at placing roadblocks to success and building plans that cannot be followed. We tend to fall back on our "common sense" or "snap judgement" which often makes us feel like our cavalier decisions were actually thought-out.  Yet, time and again, we find ourselves in deadline crunches, worried about upset customers, or angry with others because we didn't get what we want or got it too late.This is because we take on too many tasks, stick to already failed plans, and don't steer around obstacles we later say "if only we ..." about.At a time in the world where we are fully engaged with snap decisions, Personal Kanban users have the opportunity to understand and show other people how we actually learn.  In learning, we can actually take control of our work.Personal Kanban is a Metacognitive system.   When we move stickies through our PK we are seeing (with our eyes) how our work … works….

• What work is important?

• What do we enjoy doing?

• How do we change how we write stickies over time?

• How do we change the columns or sections on our board?

• What do we do when the DONE column fills up? (Hopefully we’re learning what went well).

• What tasks do we work with others on?

• When do we clean tasks out of the OPTIONS column when they’ve aged out?

• What tasks did we do that we didn’t put on the board?

• What tasks did we choose not to do that were important enough to create a sticky?

• What tasks changed in their product between writing and finishing?

• What do we learn?

Which leads to:

• How does this change our ways of working or living?

As we become comfortable with these questions, we realize that life is about creating things, working together, and being proud of our work. As we see the tickets flow across we learn what is right - for us, for the person we’re delivering work to, for the people we are working with.

Work Not Chosen

“What if there’s a task in my options column that just never moves?”This question comes up in almost every class we teach.And we ask, “What if that happens?”We get answers like, “You have to make time for it” or “We need to find out why we didn’t start it.”Maybe.  Maybe that was something really important and you just happened to do 200 other stickies.  But more likely there are a few other options.

1. You don’t want to do it. You can then ask yourself, do I really need to do this?

2. The task is poorly defined. You can then ask, what needs to be better defined? Do I have the understanding to flesh it out? Do I need help?  (Hint: most tasks are poorly defined and that’s okay.)

3. It’s not really necessary. Does this task really need to be done?

4. It’s better suited for someone else. Can I delegate this or move it to someone else’s options column?

5. IT IS HUGE! Is this task so big that it would monopolize your time.

6. The task has no victory conditions. With no definite end-state, a task is a time sync.

If in doubt, just ask the questions in the box.  Assess the risk.

The point of the options column is to give you the primary option of not doing or changing the nature of the tasks.  Our understanding of our work is emergent. You don’t start out knowing what your real finished product is. Be bold, change your options column often.