Cadence and the Personal Kanban

This is the 12th post in Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban series.

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

Comments

[topsurf]

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

[Jo Jordan]

yup, I agree rhythmn to work is everything. Have you seen http://bigpic.org? I've been waiting for this for 10 years. Perfect flexible interface for bringing in several project streams simulutaneously. Could have a few more tweaks but 90% there.

[Jim Benson]

Jo .. is that the right link?

It doesn't seem right.