Evolving Web

Personal Kanban at the World Bank: Modus Cooperandi Info Pak 1

Personal Kanban at the World Bank - Small Team Rapid Development

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This is the first in a series of Modus Cooperandi's Info Paks. They are downloadable, and work like a narrative whitepaper. Think of them like graphic novels for business.

In Info Pak One: Personal Kanban at the World Bank, we discuss the experience we had leading a rapid development project at the World Bank, specifically, how visual controls work with small groups, and why they are preferable to traditional team management. 

This Info Pak is best read by clicking the “Full” button above. It’s also designed to be downloaded to distribute to others. Over the next few weeks, we will post more Info Paks on Personal Kanban. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Why Project Managers Fail

I’ve managed a lot of projects. I tried to count them – I can’t.  As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve embraced a succession of methodologies that cumulatively represent a rather predictable evolution away from zero sum game management towards non-zero sum game management.

What does this mean?

As the science of project management  evolves, we are clearly learning that managing based on guess work is a recipe for consistent failure. Traditionally, we managed projects based on the trusted opinion of a project manager who estimated the length, scope, cost, and resources required for a project. These project managers have a natural tendency to underestimate, and their guesses are vetted through a process designed to save money, rather than arrive at an accurate estimate.

While well-intentioned, agile methodologies  have not appreciably changed this process. In the end, agile projects still obtain their backlogs in bulk and gather up-front estimates prone to error. For all of agile’s intentions, agile projects seldom break out of this pattern, even if they are well managed at the team level.

The top five reasons I see projects fail are (1) No slack in the system (2) Managing for the knowns (3) Not limiting work-in-progress (4) Political promises and (5) Sloppy communication.  Let’s examine these:

1. No Slack

Every system requires slack in order to work correctly.  Old reel-to-reel tape recorders needed an extra bit of tape fed into the mechanics to ensure that the tape wouldn’t rip. Roadways operate best at 65 to 70% capacity – they bog down over 80 and are at a dead stop at 100.  In mills, grain is fed into the stones at about 70% capacity – anything over that gums up the works and makes the mill grind to a halt.

Why, then, is slack so foreign to project management?  Because we negotiate it away every time.  Why do we do this?  Because we estimate at the individual task and not at the project level.

It’s like saying “Yes, my Porsche can go 185 miles an hour” and estimating a 90 mile drive at 30 minutes.  Then we’re surprised when there are other cars on the freeway.

“Contingency” funds rarely work to abate this problem because contingency is not real. It is arbitrary and has no basis in reality.  It is a lie. Without understanding our throughput, we cannot adequately estimate a project. 

Successful project managers understand how long tasks usually take, what role variability plays, and what types of tasks slow their processes down.

2. Managing for Knowns

We manage for knowns.  When we estimate, we use our history to '”know” when the project will be completed. We manage for people doing what we know they will and when they know we will.

That’s not a good idea.

Human systems are complicated. Yes, we can finish that task in 3 days provided no one gets sick, there isn’t a power outage, there isn’t a blizzard.  Well, there are colds and blackouts and blizzards.

Successful project managers worry less about making sure their Gantt chart is religiously adhered to or if their two-week iteration goes unhindered and more about how to elegantly deal with the unexpected.

3. Not Limiting WIP

Again, people and teams have a capacity. If you exceed a certain percentage of that capacity, people become stressed, distracted, and increasingly ineffective.  If a Freeway at 100% capacity is at a stand-still, its throughput is 0%.  If your people are at 100% capacity, their throughput is likewise seriously impaired.

Limiting work-in-progress (WIP) is vital for maintaining throughput. Intentionally limiting WIP frees people to maximize their effectiveness by ensuring they work at an adequate percentage of their capacity. In turn, WIP is used to limit the number of features the organization can feed a team at a time. This helps the organization appreciate the true opportunitiy costs of new features. WIP limits communicate that employees are a limited resource and helps upper management understand the true cost of labor.

Successful project managers understand the capacity of the individuals working under them and can regulate the flow of work to optimize their throughput.

4. Political Promises

Politics are stressful and are often no-win situations. Project managers are often placed in political situations that force them to promise to produce more with less resources. (“Can’t you just add this one additional feature?”) Project managers cannot win these political situations because they don’t understand their true throughput. Project managers need to concretely show true productivity statistics to weather these confrontations.

Being able to say with firm evidence, “It takes us 21 days to release one new feature”  diffuses political pressures and opens the door to real discussions.

Armed with a firm understanding of their operations, successful project managers can avoid overpromising due to ignorance. 

5. Sloppy Communication

Teams run on information. In my experience, most delays and waste can be traced back to communications. Do people know why they are doing what they are doing? Does the team know what their co-workers are doing? Are recent developments rapidly disseminated so workers feel at-ease? Are the actions of the team being communicated up the management chain? Is the value of people’s actions understood by all? Are improvements to the development system being quickly discussed and acted upon? Is waste being spotted and dealt with?

Now that we have a multitude of tools to communicate with, poor communication simply can no longer be tolerated. The increasing commoditization of goods and services leaves profit margins too slim to tolerate that waste.

Successful project managers build social systems designed to rapidly disseminate information, keep team members informed, provide a pipeline to other areas of the enterprise, and improve operations.

Closing

Agile methodologies are great, I’ve been using them since 1997 when William Rowden and I first built our TreePro product. They went a long way to solving some of these tensions. Prior to that, as an urban planner, I managed multi-million dollar planning and engineering projects.  As we move forward into the 21st century we need to understand that all knowledge work (which includes both software development and urban planning) requires a more adept type of project manager: a project manager that manages for the unknown because they understand the knowns very well – and those knowns include what were previously unknown: variability, waste, and politics.

Disclaimer: This is a blog post. It is short. Food for thought. Just think about it.

Announcing PersonalKanban.com

When I began to write a succession of posts on personal kanban back in July, I thought a few people might benefit from the idea. I never expected that the series would attract tens of thousands of viewers to my blog, Evolving Web.

Less than two months later, there is a growing and enthusiastic personal kanban community which has been posting photos, discussing innovations, and advancing the meme.  In a few short weeks, the community grew large enough to support a dedicated web site.

So I am pleased to formally announce the launch of personalkanban.com, a blog and resource for personal kanban.  Already, about a dozen guest posters and regular contributors have stepped forward to take the meme and run with it.

Those of you who have been reading Evolving Web for a while know I’m all about community, process, and collaboration. Seeing this community form, that it’s based on a lightweight personal process, and that collaboration is already taking place is therefore an awesome birthday present for me this year.

Please give the personalkanban.com a visit and subscribe to the feed. If you have personal kanaban stories to tell, please e-mail me at jim !at! soundbag !dot! com. The community would greatly benefit from your experiences and writing. 

The Cumulative Flow Diagram: High Performance Monitoring

In the previous post, we discussed why you would want to measure your performance in Personal Kanban. Today I’ll begin with the most powerful - but perhaps most intimidating - technique. In upcoming posts we’ll look as some less intense methods,  so don’t let this post scare you.

In kanban for software design, a "cumulative flow diagram" is used to track performance. A big part of the cumulative flow diagram is its ability to visualize how close you are to completion of a large project, and where bottlenecks or waste appears in the process. It’s a very powerful and descriptive tool.

 

Above is the cumulative flow diagram  for the Modus Cooperandi Personal Kanban.  The diagram illustrates how many tasks we have in a given part of our workflow. This is our workflow, so you don’t need to emulate it. The components are as follows: 

Backlog: Items that have yet to make it into the workflow.

Priority 3: Items that are coming up in importance.

Priority 2: Items that are important.

Priority 1: Items that need to be done soon.

Working: Items in the process of being done.

The Pen: Items that are waiting for external input.

Complete: Items we’ve done today.

Archive: Items we’ve completed in the past.

On this particular day, we completed 96 things in the past, accomplished  2 that day, sequestered 3 in the pen, and so forth.  Of course, as time goes on, your archive is going to become bigger and bigger.  In a directed project with a finite number of tasks, this is a very important part of the diagram. For personal kanban however, where tasks will build up forever, it shows us how much we’ve done or are capable of doing.

Simply from a flow perspective though, we might want to eliminate that part of the diagram.

 

So here, with no archive, we can discern some interesting patterns.

First, we see where we complete some serious work. We also notice where we gain a lot more work.  So on days where there is a tremendous dip in the number of tasks, in the above chart (but no dip in the first), we know that we moved a tremendous amount to the archive.

We can also see where we build up backlog again.  So, essentially what we have here are two graphs that show us (1) we are completing work and the number of tasks completed is continuing a fairly uniform rise, and (2) we see the actual variations in our work and when we take work on.

Since the chart is a time slice taken daily at midnight, the parts of the kanban with a WIP limit should be uniform, and represented by fairly flat bands, with the only variation coming from “The Pen,” “working,” and “done.”  If we have work in the backlog, we should be maintaining a fairly even amount of work in the queue.  The diagram illustrates that we've been working to achieve this, and as we’ve worked more closely, the uniformity is starting to manifest itself.

What we want to avoid is having the backlog band grow at an alarming rate. We want work there to feed the queue, but if it gets too overwhelming, we then know we have to start saying no to tasks.

The time it takes to move a task from backlog to completion is called “lead time.”  The time it takes to complete a task when you start working on it is  called “cycle time.” “Work time" is how long tasks were on your board, and active.  “Wait time” is how long a task sits idle in a queue, while waiting to be moved.  In a personal kanban, you might move one or even dozens of tasks across your board in a single day, so for you these are the numbers to watch for variation. 

If at some point you notice your lead time jumps to 20 days, it’s obvious that you have too much backlog. If your cycle time jumps, something is stopping you from starting work.  If your work time jumps, something is stopping you from completing work. If your wait time jumps, something might be stopping you from working at all.

So...how do you measure this?  At the end of each day, you can track the information in the cumulative flow diagram by counting the cards in each part of the work flow, and entering them into a spreadsheet.  For the “times” you can write start and end dates on the cards, and calculate from there.

Or you can use Agile Zen - which is where these images came from - and leave the tracking up to Nate.

How Am I Doing? – Measuring Success in Personal Kanban

One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment of his life.
- Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Okay, so we’ve gone through several ways kanban can look, be used, and operate. We’ve discussed ways to prioritize work. But we have yet to address how to measure (gulp) performance. But what exactly is “performance,” and why do we care?

Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno is credited with the initial deployment of kanban, and the creation of Lean and Just-in-Time management concepts. His goal was to make Toyota the world's leader in automobile production, so he needed some metrics. Ohno understood that simple numbers did not drive performance, but that Toyota's staff and its suppliers needed the will to work better.  

Along the way, physicist Eli Goldratt came up with the Theory of Constraints (TOC). (You can hear Goldratt say he needs 4 days to define TOC in this video.) His glowing gem of wisdom is that we conceptually overcomplicate problem solving by identifying way too many constraints to arrive at a solution. When we want to get to a goal, we tend to lose the goal from all the little issues that surround it. But, usually there are one or two big constraints that, if solved, will both provide huge results and often solve a lot of the little constraints or make them irrelevant.

The beauty of both these messages is that small changes make big differences – if they are the right small changes. What do you need to identify the right small changes to increase the will to work better? Awareness.

Personal kanban helps give us that awareness, enabling us to begin to listen to ourselves. A few posts back I discussed retrospectives, how they were vital at the beginning and became less so as we incorporated self-improvement into our normal actions. As you focus less on that massive pile of little nuisance constraints that surround you, and move instead to the high-payoff constraints, you move to what Ohno calls a “kaizen” state. You begin to continuously look for ways to improve your quality of life.

Please notice, I’m not telling you how to improve your life or even suggesting what improvement looks like. That’s totally up to you. If you want to work towards helping to save the rainforests, that’s fine. If your goal is smoking 10 cartons of cigarettes a day while watching cage fighting...well, I guess someone has to do it.  Our goals are our own. They’re not for retirement, they are for living. If you want wifi and code, you design your life to allow wifi and code.

If we can clear the big things that Goldratt calls constraints or Ohno calls waste from our plate, what’s left is a clear and open space to do some real living.

Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.

- Maslow, Maslow on Management

In upcoming posts, I will cover a few ways - some absurdly simple, others a little more complicated - for how your personal kanban can tell you some pretty amazing things about how you work. Hidden in those post-its is some pretty awesome insight.

Image: The Programmer’s Hierarchy of Needs

cc. David Flanders

Kanban is Workipedia

A wiki is a website anyone can edit.

A kanban is a workflow anyone can edit.

A wiki entry is always able to be improved upon.

A kanban card is always able to be refined.

In wikis, there is a constant reification of ideas.

In kanban, there is a constant reification of work.

In wikis, incorrect information is identified by the group and excised.

In kanban, waste is identified by the group and excised.

A wiki stores and displays information to make group effort available to all.

A kanban stores and displays information to make group effort available to all.

A wiki stores and displays information to make personal contribution explicit.

A kanban stores and displays information to make personal contribution explicit.

A wiki draws on the natural human drive to complete a task.

A kanban draws on the natural human drive to complete a task.

A wiki is self healing through social editing.

A kanban is self healing through social management.

A wiki is a fundamentally simple concept with massive social repercussions.

A kanban is a fundamentally simple concept with massive social repercussions.

Kanban is Workipedia.

Viral Joy – Watching the Spread of Personal Kanban

It has been fascinating to watch the personal kanban meme spread through use and not through pontification.  When people see a personal kanban in action, it just makes sense to them.

Parents start with their own kanban and soon their kids have them and then the family shares them. Peter has one, then his girlfriend wants one as well.

There are stories coming in from people who have used personal kanban or something rather like it over the last several years. Educators and therapists have been giving me excellent feedback insofar as why it works for kids. Why it works for adults. And why it has such an instant appeal.

Hearing from practitioners in all sorts of fields is showing me that a visual flow-based self management system is simply how we are wired.  That everyone can benefit from it has been shown time and again.

The fact that kanban can move seemlessly from the shop floor to children to development teams to all everyone surely must be telling us something.  People aren’t just starting to use a kanban because it’s an alternative to the to-do list.  They are using it because it is expressive, fun and makes life easier.

Retrospectives and Personal Kanban

In both Agile and Lean management there are points called "retrospectives," regular and ritualized moments where a team stops to reflect. Checking processes for only a few minutes lets you re-orient the course of your work. These retrospectives allow a team the opportunity not only to celebrate or bemoan accomplishments or setbacks, but likewise to serve as a constructive way to create and direct their course.  A retrospective shows us that things either went well or they didn’t, understanding that either way, there is always room for plotting the effectiveness of future work.

Over the past few months, I've spoken with many people who've begun to use personal kanban. During the course of this thread, many of them have shared how they've started to deploy Kanban as a collaborative tool, using it to plan, prioritize, and do work both at home and in their place of business. Now we have to go that last step - we have to think about what we’ve done.

Whether it’s on our own, with our families, or with a team, a retrospective is vital in being able to identify, elucidate, and enact positive change. Retrospectives can take place at whatever intervals you are comfortable with, and for whatever period of time. Again, I’m not writing a how-to manual here, these tools should help you or your group manage tasks in a way that works best for you. 

We can - and will - discuss a range of options for what a retrospective might look like.  But just like a kanban can reside on a white board, a piece of paper, a computer screen, or even a kitchen appliance, a retrospective is what works at the time.  If you are just finishing a project in the garage or on day 4 of hurricane disaster relief, checking your processes for only a few minutes will let you improve what you're doing 

You don’t have to fly to Pluto to gain from small course corrections. You want to always be fine-tuning your workflow and your work management. In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about a variety of retrospective styles – some that are thought exercises and others with statistical rigor. Whatever you prefer, there should be one for you and your team.

Note: When Kanban is working really well, and you have an intimate understanding of your work, then you will achieve what Lean calls a "kaizen state,"  a culture of continuous improvement. At that point, you are constantly doing retrospectives simply because you are so aware of your actions, and a such, a separate retrospective may not be necessary. 

See the whole Personal Kanban series.

NewHorizons2015 is NASA’s Pluto Mission – which requires both course corrections and a whole lot of delayed gratification.

Sente and Gote in Personal Kanban

Sometimes your relationship to work is initiative based, other times it is reactive.  This is simply the nature of work. It is normal, and nothing - not personal kanban, not GTD - is going to change that.

In the game “Go” (“Weiqi” in Chinese) there are balanced strategic concepts for the natural ebbs and flows of taking the initiative or reacting to a change in a situation.  “Sente” is the term for the initiative, “Gote” is the term for being reactive.

In English, we’d be tempted to equate these to Offense and Defense.  However, there’s a subtle difference here. The word “defense” has a few connotations we’d like to avoid when working. One is that you are on the defensive when you’ve lost control of something. The other is that the goal of your defensive strategy is to quickly regain an offensive strategy.

This comes from the animal brain inside us all. Reaction is the gazelle taking flight when the cheetah springs forth. Reaction, for human beings, naturally caries a fight or flight response.

In Go, Sente and Gote positions are perfectly acceptable at all times. There are Go Masters who can win a game and play almost entirely from a Gote position. The Sensei knows that reaction is itself an action.

Why is this important?

Life comes at you fast. The nature of personal work is that some days are quiet, comfortable, and predictable. They are yard work or cleaning the house. Systematic and reassuring. Other days your water heater explodes and covers your basement in water, steam and destruction.

Some days you are at work, methodically finishing up your report and other days you are surprised to get a report back with particularly nasty comments and an unrealistic deadline to fix it.

On days like this we realize that life doesn’t always respect our personal goals. Mopping up water and pulling down saturated wall board isn’t helping us achieve our goal of learning Spanish. This makes us feel like we are on the English term defensive, and that upsets us.  We wanted to learn Spanish by Tuesday and now we have to wait.

Well, this is why most businesses fail. It’s why bosses are cranky.  It’s why people don’t feel they get what they want from consultants.  It’s why that damn plumber is STILL HERE installing the dishwasher.

Life is, by its very nature, chaotic. We’re lucky that it is predictably so, but it still does not adhere to our plans. Whether you are doing Sente or Gote work, the work needs to be done. The best way to assure rapid and effective completion is to look past the emotions of “defensive” and accept Gote into the attainment of your goals.

What kanban seeks to do is visualize how your work is actually done. It actually accounts for exploding water heaters and other unexpected events because, over time, your throughput will reflect these.

So, say you have 20 projects at home and they have an average cycle time of 4 weeks from conception to completion.  The mean time to completion though, might only be 2 weeks.  There were a few outliers in there that took 6 or 8 due to unforseen events.

What you know from this is that you have a maximum of 8 weeks to complete a household project, it’ll usually be done around 2 and that 6 is a very safe number to promise completion by, with 8 being virtually guaranteed.  As you notice this, you can start to examine why those 8s are happening.

I’d be willing to bet those 8s are projects that developed a defensive posture and were delayed due to emotional reasons. In short, they were shelved because they became too hard to finish. Well, those unfinished projects mount up and procrastination has a price. You now have a 2 to 8 week variance in the time it takes you to finish something around the house.

So we can examine those projects. Are the 8 week ones just more complex? Do they involving cleaning? Yard work? Being outside when the chatty neighbor might want to chew your ear off? Are they perhaps even unimportant?

When you find the commonalities in the outliers, you can then develop Gote strategies.  As I said, Go Masters are unphased by adopting a Gote posture because there are deep and tested strategies for achieving victory from Gote maneuvers. Part of this is tactical series of moves that undo an offensive maneuver by your opponent, but the other part is mental. Reaction to events whether on the Go board or in life in general is natural.  Acceptance of this natural relationship calms the fight / flight response in our animal brains and allows us to quickly and effectively deal with the unexpected work. This reduces the time to completion, shrinks our cycle time, and eliminates outliers.

Be calm, deal with the issues, reduce variance.

The Orange Days of My Personal Kanban

I am famous (perhaps too famous) for hating administrative work. I’ll let it pile up like nobody’s business. So in my personal kanban on Agile Zen, I colored my administrative tasks bright orange. That way if I dynamically deprioritized them because I hated them, I would be confronted daily with them piling up in my backlog. 

Being able to visualize them, showed me the weight of their existential overhead until finally I had to give up and just do a bunch of them en masse.

Use a little creativity to call out certain kinds of tasks that may require special attention – either they need to be grouped or you just need a little extra reminder about their importance.