As Jim Benson and I discover daily when we assess the previous day’s progress on our shared personal kanban, frequent retrospectives are invaluable for any working group. By moving each other’s tasks from “Complete” to “Archive,” we are afforded the opportunity to:
- reflect on the previous day’s output
- orient the course of our current work
- celebrate “Yay You!” or “Yay Me!” milestones
- address those “This didn’t work and here’s how we can fix it going forward” moments
Thanks to AgileZen, our personal kanban has become indispensable. In its absence, I could hardly remember what we did last week, and certainly not with much accuracy. This got me thinking how the value of personal kanban extends to the dreaded self-assessment / performance evaluation process.
To be sure, the concept of an annual review is fundamentally flawed. In any situation, continuous feedback is always preferable to having one conversation at twelve or even six month intervals. Within the organization, valuable coaching moments are squandered when retrospectives in the form of evaluations are held months after the fact. There is more potential in correcting actions – and more impact to rewarding them – when the event is fresh in people’s minds, rather than waiting and depending on their degrading memory of it.
Especially in today’s economy, with an overwhelming number of positions facing elimination and even entire departments threatened by downsizing, the ability to qualitatively and quantitatively justify the existence of your job is crucial. More than ever, it is up to the individual to advocate for that raise, bonus and / or promotion. Rather than “tell” your supervisors that you rock, you have to “show” them exactly why you are a performance superstar.
But how can you do this when you have only a vague recollection of what your actual accomplishments are and nary a memory of the obstacles you faced?
By leveraging personal kanban as a prompt, past responsibilities and deliverables are easily recalled and cited, particularly if you are color-coding tasks / story cards by project or even skill.
Your goal here is to present the clearest picture possible of measurable performance, so try annotating your kanban cards with reminders of:
- the challenges you faced
- the value creation your performance brought to your team or client
- the net value to the organization (lowered costs, reduced inefficiencies, etc.)
- other information you or your organization might value
Likewise, your archived items can also assist in:
- justifying resources needed
- establishing a development plan
- identifying the following year’s goals
In an upcoming post, the value of personal kanban will be explored from the performance evaluator’s standpoint.
Photo by Tonianne.
There is nothing more satisfying than knowing that you are taking the tasks given to you and hitting them out of the park on a daily basis. I believe that is why I been so taken by Personal Kanban. I love seeing the flow of my work, what is successful, and what I have to tweak to make me even more successful. It has helped me tremendously to be more productive. As a direct reflection of that it has brought me to new levels and responsibilities with my job. That to me equals success.
I too have recently started delving deep into Personal Kanban. I am a software developer and have recently come up with a new flow that I found REALLY enables me to clearly identify obstacles in my tasks then think about how to eliminate them not only there and then, but also review following completion of the task.
I came up with the acronym COMIK (Conception, Obstacles, Model, Implement, Kaizen) – I wrote a blog post about it here: http://bit.ly/4eMOm2
The next step for me is really trying to find a way to actually measure improvement in a simple-yet-effective way. A difficult task. I look forward to seeing what ideas evolve on this blog!
Keep the great posts coming!
Thanks so much for your comments, Topsurf and Rob.
You both punctuate a key issue – observing flow to see what works and what can be improved – something you just don’t get from the average, linear to-do list. I keep going back to the “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” dictum. Precisely why retrospectives are so important and why personal kanban is not just my preferred organizational method, but more specifically, my productivity tool of choice.
Rob, I appreciate how in your own blog you focus on adapting and improving processes to create value. I am truly looking forward to hearing and learning more from you.
Welcome aboard!