The Benefits of Personal Kanban

This is the third in a series of posts regarding personal kanban, or, using kanban to manage your personal tasks. Yesterday’s post discussed the inherent difficulties. Today I'll offer a few benefits of why you’d want to have your own personal kanban in the first place.

Understanding:  A kanban lets you immediately visualize the weight of commitments you've made, and encourages you to limit your work in progress (WIP).  When you can see your current level of commitment, you understand it better. 

Assessing Value: This understanding leads to a deeper appreciation for the real value of your time.  Not only can you now make better risk assessments, but when you promise someone something you know what the personal cost is of that promise. You will have a better idea about when you can deliver on that promise, without losing sleep.

Mitigating Risk: Making your tasks conspicuous leads to introspection – we start to ask if we are capable of finishing something and how that will impact the other tasks.  We can see it on the physical board.  We can re-arrange our tasks at-will to create the most productive day.

Prioritization: Now that we have a better understanding of the value of our work and its associated levels of risk, we can better prioritize what it is that we are doing.  To be sure, prioritization is still not easy, but at least now we can feel like we’re doing more than engaging in guess-work or putting out fires.

The Personal Value Stream: As we work more with our visualized tasks, we can get a better idea of what our personal value stream is. This might be conceptual, and difficult to put into words. Case in point: Last night, I pulled a piece of meat off the grill. The steak didn’t “look” done, but I knew it was. When I brought it in the house, it was perfectly cooked. I couldn’t explain how I knew it would be, I had just worked with meat on the grill enough to know. Your personal value stream is equally learnable, yet hard to quantify. Knowing your personal value stream greatly helps in the selection of work items and defining done.

Next: Personal Kanban Approaches...

Comments

[topsurf]

Assessing Value is the most important part of the personal kanban for me. You nailed it perfectly with "You will have a better idea about when you can deliver on that promise, without losing sleep."

[Jim Benson]

Patty, I'm looking forward to seeing where you can take this in teaching. David Anderson had a great anecdote from his daughter's school that I'm hoping he uses soon.

Next installment will be next week. I hate to make you wait! :-)

[Michael Arnoldus]

Dear Jim,

I love this idea - the personal kanban.

I have question, possibly more related to kanban used in SW and office work. Everybody claims it's supposed to be a pull model for work, however it seems inverted to me. In a production line, the market pulls a finished item (could be a car - maybe even a Toyota :-) of the production line, based on a need. When the car is pulled upstream work gets activated because it's needed. Just In Time. Not before. The kanban is then simply the "sign" that communicates the pull upstream.

But these kanban boards seems to do things the other way around. Some explanations say that a work item is pulled, "when work is needed" - however that's not pull, that's push - producing when there's spare capacity and not when there's a need for the end product.

So the question arises - what gets processed in the value stream? What's the material in this flow? What's the product taken of the end of line, the "thing" that's produced "Just in time"?

It seems to me the backlog is actually an expression of what's needed and thus what should be pulled (from the right) and not the material that actually pushed into the line from the left.

I'd love to get your view on this.