Reflections on Personal Kanban: A Series

The other night over pastries and slowly delivered tea in Seattle, David Anderson and I spent a good deal of time discussing personal kanban.  I said that I had been using them for a while, and didn’t think it was a big deal.  David was adamant that it was in fact a big deal, because the nature of personal tasks is much more complex than team tasks. He then encouraged me to blog about my experiences with it.

For a while now, I’ve been using personal kanbans for myself and for my teams. At Modus Cooperandi, Corey Ladas and I experimented with a variety of them.  While they aren't especially easy to implement, they are nevertheless useful. So over the next month I’m going to discuss the inherent difficulties of personal kanban, how we tried to overcome them, and some strategies for their use.

A kanban is a board where you visualize and track your work in progress. It is also a diagnostic tool, as you watch work be invented and systematically completed, you see where you are doing well and where you are being delayed. These delays are called "waste". You'd like to do as much work and remove as much waste as possible. This is the goal of kanban. 

If you are unfamiliar with kanban in general, I like Karl Scotland's kanban primer. Note his definitions of WIP, swim lanes, flow, and cadence. 

Kanban is supposed to be flexible. If there's a sacred cow, it should be eaten. Corey and I often talked about “Capital K Kanban,” where certain implementations of kanban would become confused with kanban itself – making the processes rigid.  This is what has happened to Agile, and we could see kanban taking the same path. The implementation became confused with the tool.

For me, there are a few key principles for kanban, and after that, you are on your own.

1. Visualization: Primarily, kanban is a visualization tool.  Its goal is to make work explicit.  By making work explicit, we are able to understand where value is created, where waste is hiding, and how we function.

2. Flexibility: Teams and processes are not static. There is no one workflow to rule them all. While most kanban will be similar, they will rarely be identical. Likewise, the way one kanban records activity will be different from another. We can have workflow kanban, task-based kanban, and others too.

3. WIP: WIP stands for Work-in-Progress. Lean techniques like kanban aim to help us limit WIP and streamline our work habits. Kanban exists to help us understand the weight of the work we take on. We never want to lift more than we can handle. Simply throwing tasks on a board means nothing, if you aren’t using that board to be more effective. Even in my task-based kanbans, there is still WIP. In the photo above the (5) is my WIP. I shouldn’t be doing more than 5 things at a time.

4. The Ideal is Unattainable: Personal kanban work will quickly show you that there is no ideal way to manage individual work. Getting a date with Halle Barry or George Clooney is one trillion times easier than perfectly managing individual work. Now, before you start planning your outfit for your your dream date, it is very easy to use personal kanban to manage your individual work a lot better than you probably are right now. Remember, the goal isn’t perfection, it’s making things better.

5. Standard Work: Standard work is meant to normalize the task sizes and types. The more that work is standardized, the easier it is to estimate and schedule. Personal work is tenacious at undermining standard work.

The Goal: Your goal with personal kanban is not to merely have a better to-do list. It is to understand the work you have, the number of tasks you have, how you schedule, and how likely you are to make good on your promises. You will do this by visualizing your tasks, your flow of work, and the differences in types of projects you take on.

Upcoming posts in this series will address:

• Issues that Make Personal Kanban Different
• The Benefits of Personal Kanban
• Tangible Tasks Produce Prioritization 
• An Overview of Personal Kanban Approaches
• The Time Capsule Approach
• The Throughput Approach
• The Subproject Approach
• The Sequestering Approach
• The Task-Based Approach
• Cadence and the Personal Kanban
• Finding Waste in Personal Kanban 
• Measuring Throughput in Personal Kanban 
• Distributed Personal Kanban for Teams

Comments

[topsurf]

I look forward to reading the rest of this series. I have not used this tool to this degree but plan to implement it now. I am huge list maker in order to get my tasks/goals achieved on my projects both in a personal and on a professional level.

[Josh]

I find this phenomenon of personal task based work flow models to be intriguing. It feels like self administered Taylorism.

Management, do'ers, observers, and counters trying to find harmony. Be mindful we are human, animal not machine.

[Jim Benson]

Hi Josh,

I am assuming you are part of the Oh Taylor My Taylor conversation going on in the Agile Management list.

For me, the randomness of human life is exactly where this is going. Introspection helps us find harmony, but not entirely in a mechanistic sense. If that were the case, we'd all be behavioralists - spouting our Piaget and Skinner.

To do lists remove context from the things we are doing. It is hoped that personal kanban can help visualize context, thereby allowing us to embrace our humanity while avoiding our tendencies to over commit.