HOW TO: Limit WIP #6: Count The Bosses–Show the Work

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Jim Benson

It’s hard to limit your work-in-progress when your boss count exceeds your WIP limit.

If you have a WIP Limit of 3 and 12 bosses, you may as well have one card permanently in your Personal Kanban that says, “Negotiate with Bosses”.

That sounds funny, but it is true. Your bosses will always require explanations about why you are working on tasks that are unrelated to their work.

Tonianne and I play a game with people regularly called “Count The Bosses.” The rules are simple…. you count your bosses.

If you need more than a few fingers to count them, you know that part of your job is not only satisfying their demands, but also choosing which one to be attentive to at any given point-in-time.

Your bosses are people who directly give you work. In a few days, we’ll have a post #7 which deals with understanding your customers. For today, however, we simply want a number … how many people are giving you work?

Then ask these questions:

  1. Do these people consult with each other before giving me work?
  2. Do I feel guilty when I’m working for one when another has needs?
  3. Am I punished for doing work for one boss over another?
  4. Am I in the middle of their disputes?
  5. Will they let me complete tasks before giving me another?
  6. Do they allow me to complete my work in a way that works for me, rather than working in ways they think I should?

What we would like is have answers that give them the right to give us work, but give us the ability to complete that work in the best way we see fit.

If your answers are not in this direction, it is useful to show on a Personal Kanban what is really happening. Then discuss this with them around the board. Do not just go talk to them, because neither of you will have anything physical to talk about. The goal here is to use the board as a mediator. We want the board to reveal how there is too much work-in-progress and that the work load itself is hampering your ability to complete things on time.

Have your bosses watch this strangely silent YouTube Video. Let them know you, too, have an optimal WIP limit.

Limit Your WIP

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HOW TO: Limit WIP #5–Throughput Analysis

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Jim Benson

When we think about limiting Work-in-process, we have to confront that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough, we have to know what we are limiting. We have to see what we are really completing.

A very real danger for us as people is that we limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the most important task to pull next” without understanding the weights of types of tasks.

We have tasks that might:

  • make us money
  • satisfy someone else’s needs
  • teach us something
  • provide us pleasure / opportunity to relax
  • gain us political favor / help avoid political disfavor
  • satisfy bureaucratic requirements
  • etc.

Depending on the situation, we will pick one of these over another. However, very often Tonianne and I see people favoring office demands over personal growth, emergencies over kaizen, and politics over family. This behavior creates new personal emergencies. If you ignore your spouse and your kids long enough, that has repercussions – the best of which would be that they feel ignored, the worst can be much worse.

Back at the office, the emergency we are tending to right now is at the cost of other work on other project that, after it languishes for a while will also become an emergency. And the cycle continues.

The sad truth is that quite often we create our own emergencies and, therefore, our own spiral into an emergency-centered life. When we reach this point, we say, “How can I possibly limit my WIP? Everything is an emergency!”

Emergencies Create Throughput Issues Create More Emergencies

In this video, we see the impacts of a workplace emergency. New emergencies are spawned at home and at work. The point here is not to say, “Don’t have emergencies,” but to understand how they can create an emergency cascade. If the person in the video would have hired a handyman at home and found even one person at the office to help him, his dilemma could have been avoided.

The key here is balance. The tickets at the end of the week were all focused on the Desper Project, rather than on all of his goals. The more balanced the tasks are at the end of the week, the more balanced goal attainment will be. The visual cue of only red tasks let us know that new emergencies were brewing.

When you are setting up your Personal Kanban, ask yourself what your goals are and make sure the stickies are designed to give you feedback on what you are and what you are not completing.

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Personal Kanban Wins the Shingo Prize

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Jim Benson

Shingo EmblemPersonal Kanban won a Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence this year. This is the highest honor in Lean and we share the award with some pretty august company.

This award is humbling. Shingo awards are usually focused on manufacturing or applications of specific Lean principles with many direct nods to Toyota.

Personal Kanban is strongly rooted in Lean ideals, but it much more focused (as the name implies) on the individual – on us as people.

Tonianne and I are greatly energized by this award and look forward to seeing Personal Kanban continue to grow and thrive.

Read about it on CBS News and the Lean Systems Society sites.

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HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #4– How to Size Tasks (sort of)

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Jim Benson

Strangely, although people routinely overburden themselves with work, their first objection to limiting work-in-progress is “don’t all my tasks need to be the same size? How do I size my work?” They hear the possibility that we can get more work done in a system where we see our work and focus on completion, but they are doubtful that this is enough.

So, after never paying attention to your work at all, now you want to be a superhuman estimator as well?

Simply changing how we think about work can help us manage work.

Ultimately, for me, I recommend not paying attention to task size at all at first. Wait until you actually see your work flow for a while.

But, at some point, you will start to get a little more sophisticated and start to really wonder about task sizes.

In this video, Stephen Covey plays a game where he coerces this apparent executive to place rocks in a tub. The goal is to put in the big rocks after all the little tasks have been achieved. The little tasks can be seen as interruptions, distractions, or the day-to-day minutia of working.

The end-result is that it is, of course, easier to plan for the big rocks (by putting them in first) and there’s still plenty of capacity for the little rocks to fit into the nooks and crannies.

I really love Stephen Covey and have gained mightily from his insights. However here, we can see a few flaws and they related precisely to our fears about task sizing and estimation.  (Go on, watch the video, then come back to this…)

Planning for the Big Rocks

Our issue here is that we are trying to size elements (little rocks) of larger concepts (big rocks) without fully understanding the larger concepts. How many of us focus on the task we are assigned, but don’t question the overall project?  How many of us get bogged down in a task and then notice the deadline looming and say, “I’ll make up for this delay later?” How many of us take on a two-hour project that we work on for two-days?

In short, we can’t really distinguish big and little rocks.

We end up focusing on the size of tasks and not the flow of tasks. We wonder what the cost of delay is, but we can’t measure it because there is no flow for the delay to impact.

Covey is making the same mistake most people make, he thinks those things are ROCKS. This implies that they have definite shape, weight, and color. Corporate planning is not a solid, it is a gas. It will fill the space you provide. If you give Covey’s rocks no definition, they will swell up and overflow your big plastic tub. (Am I really posting about gaseous rocks?)

This tortured analogy is necessary only because we all simultaneously conceive of projects as definite and without form. We recognize the number of unknowns. We make plans and they scare us. The more scared we are, the more we try to tightly control our projects. This is like bearhugging a water balloon. At some point we control too much (hug too tightly) and it explodes all over us. Then we get frustrated and blame the balloon. (more analogies!)

Better the Bucket

Projects are actually the bucket. Tasks are the rocks. Most tasks, as Covey shows, are pebbles. They flow through our day as easily, and as awkwardly, as they did when she poured them in at the end. Most flew right on in, but every so often she had to stop and shake the bucket.

That made everyone laugh, and it made her and Covey grin conspiratorial little grins.

Why? Because it was awkward.

And so is our work.

In the end, the size of any of those tasks didn’t matter a bit. What did matter is she devised a system that noted that there were observable differences in her task types. She put one task type in first, in a deliberate way, and then allowed the other task type to flow.  In this case it was physical size.

In other cases it could be something else.

Context Has a Size

Tasks all have context that relate to our concept of their size. If I told you, your task was to walk into the next room and get something I just printed out of the printer, you’d estimate the size of that task to be small. If the next room involved crossing a pool filled with crocodiles, you might be surprised when it took you longer.

The politics, emotional weight, and implementation details of the seemingly smallest task can prove to be gigantic. We simply won’t know until we understand the system. When she understood Covey’s system, she changed her approach to work.

Size might matter.

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Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2013 Announced

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Jim Benson

Kaizen CampJoin us July 30-31 as Modus Cooperandi will be hosting its third annual Kaizen Camp: Seattle on the beautiful grounds of the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture. 

Join Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry as we host our third year of Personal Kanban, continuous improvement, and better work management in Seattle. This event is two days, with wonderful food, conversation, and learning in a beautiful setting.

Early bird pricing is $99 for the two-day event and only 175 people can attend, so register NOW!

Last year we sold out quickly. We look forward to seeing you there.

Kaizen Camp™ is an unconference. It’s two idea-dense days of conversations about learning, creating, and building value through Lean Principles, agile methodologies, systems thinking, problem-solving, the thought leadership of people like Deming, Ackoff, Kahneman, and Argyris, real-world stories, and the impacts of collaboration and respect in the workplace. Kanban, Personal Kanban, GTD, Agile, Six Sigma, 5s, Cynefin are all on the table…but so are the root of all these forms: Continuous Improvement or Kaizen.

Kaizen Camp 5Join practitioners, thinkers, and luminaries from across healthcare, education, manufacturing, retail, human resources, publishing, software development, and personal productivity. We had a sold-out crowd last year, and we expect to sell-out again quickly. So be sure to register today.

Kaizen Camp™ is brought to you by Modus Cooperandi and sponsored by:

 

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HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #3–Reducing Interruptions

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Jim Benson

22069889_2fec506fbbFour hours ago, I walked up to a big pad of paper and started mind mapping all the types of interruptions we might face while trying to get our work done.

  • While I was working, Tonianne, who was on Skype, wanted to do a microphone test.
  • Then I received an e-mail for a meeting request from a client.
  • While responding to that, I received a lunch request from a colleague.
  • While responding to that, e-mail arrived from another client with documents needed for our meeting. So I accepted those Google docs and scanned them.
  • While responding to that, my bladder told me that I should rush off for a bio break.
  • After that, I rushed to the board and started writing furiously about things that might interrupt us.
  • Then Tonianne wanted to discuss some work that was coming up.
  • Then I had my meeting.

And now, 3.5 hours later, I am finally writing this blog post.

My goal is to get this done by my call at 1 pm.

How do we limit our work-in-progress in a world of constant interruptions?

Interruptions are more common in knowledge work than work, it seems. They are little things, one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Happening here and there.

What is an Interruption?

The Free Dictionary defines Interruption as:

in·ter·rupt (nt-rpt)

v. in·ter·rupt·ed, in·ter·rupt·ing, in·ter·rupts

1. To break the continuity or uniformity of: Rain interrupted our baseball game.

2. To hinder or stop the action or discourse of (someone) by breaking in on: The baby interrupted me while I was on the phone.

3. To break in on an action or discourse.

All three of these are important to us at work. While we are working, we are achieving (hopefully) a state of flow. Both in the psychological and the mechanical sense of the word, we are actively focusing, working, and completing the task at hand.

An interruption is anything that breaks that flow-state. <The phone just rang. On call for 2m13s.>

When we break that flow state, just like that side comment about my own interruption broke up the flow of this post, we have several states we transition through:

  1. Initial shock (Oh my god, I’m being Interrupted!)
  2. Adjustment (Context switch into new context)
  3. Existence (Live in new context)
  4. Closure (Close off new context)
  5. Return (Return to previous context)

Depending on the detail needed by the interruption, these states can take take minutes, tens of minutes, or more. Luckily for me, my interruption was minor and rather fun, so leaving the blog post and coming back was relatively easy.

Interruptions and You

Since most interruptions are small, routine, and often important, we tend not to notice them. When interruptions are annoying, we do notice them. Then, when we are late in finishing something, we will blame our lateness on the annoying interruption and conveniently forget all the other ones.

The fact is that interruptions are part of knowledge work. We seldom do it alone, which means we have colleagues. Colleagues require information. Information requires communication. Communication requires attention.

We are also social animals. So, if I come into your office and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about the Amalgamated Salamander contract,” you are likely going to say, “Okay,” and we’ll talk. Even if you say “No,” you are unlikely to simply say “No,” and ignore me from then on, because that’s rude. And if you are truly rude, you will not stop at “No,” you’ll tell me exactly why you don’t have time for me which is still an interruption.

We cannot declare interruptions as waste, either. Knowledge work and personal work is fraught with rapid changes in context. Micropriorities that never existed on your project plan crop up every day. Like “Hey, Barb’s out sick, you still want to have that meeting?” Or “I just got this fax from the FDA and they are claiming that epoxy isn’t a food and we have to pull our Gluey-Chooies off the market.” Things like that.

So, we need to understand what our interruptions really are, before we decide that we want to eliminate them.

There are many systems out there to help you isolate yourself from interruptions, but completely closing yourself off from change – in an environment with high degrees of change – doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Understanding Interruptions

In order to know a thing, you must become a thing. So, you must first go out and interrupt as many people as you can.

No … scratch that.

In order to understand interruptions, a good place to start is to (surprise) visualize them. Here are some suggested ways in increasing levels of complexity.

Write Them Down: That’s simple enough. Keep a pad of paper nearby and when you are interrupted by ANYTHING write it down. Even if you are interrupted by daydreaming about how awesome lunch is going to taste.

Add Them to Your Kanban: Get a special shaped sticky notes, like maybe ones shaped like the human cochlea (or something) and add substantial interruptions to your board. This way you can track them and see them mixed with your other work.

Record Severity:  Create a table on a sheet of paper. 8 rows for the hours of the day, and 12 boxes for five minute increments. Then color in the boxes during which you were interrupted from your primary task.

Now that you’ve recorded them. Ask some key questions:

  • Are these interruptions necessary?
  • Did I provide or receive value while involved in this interruption?
  • Does this interruption happen frequently?
  • Can I schedule this interruption, making it a planned event?
  • Did I have the time and mental capacity to help with this interruption?

Again, the goal is not to eradicate interruptions. The goal is to understand them and work with them. Some will be waste and you can remove them. Some will be part of your job and you must find elegant ways to work with them.

Limiting Work in Progress

After you understand the nature of your interruptions, you can build much more resilient strategies for limiting work-in-progress. We can limit unnecessary interruptions, understand when it is appropriate for us to sequester ourselves in a Pomodoro, and structure our work to allow us to stay as much within our WIP limits as possible.

Photo: “Dorrie Interrupts Sissy Bathing” by Paul Schultz.

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HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #2–Affinity Mapping

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Jim Benson

Lightroom-2

Does this look familiar?

This is a problem, because an disorderly and frightening READY column is, in and of itself, a form of work-in-progress. Even if you are limiting your WIP, looking at that huge string of demanding post-its weighs us down just looking at it.

When we limit our personal Work-in-progress, our ultimate goal is to provide a calm, stable, and flowing state of work. We want a system that allows us to focus on the task and hand and complete quality work.

Having a huge, daunting backlog undermines our quality and destroys our focus.

What we need to do is focus this work. We can start by gathering some of those tasks together into groups and taking a look at what they really are.

We can do this by doing a quick exercise called Affinity Mapping.

We take the bulk of the stickies that we have in our read column and we sort them into groups that feel right. These might be easy, medium, and hard. These might be project 1, project 2, project 3. There might be two categories or there might be ten.

Lightroom-3In the end, however, you’ll have your pile of pain sorted into easy-to-digest groups.

Then, you can name your groups. In this case they are “Household Projects”, “Office Work”, and “End-of-Year Taxes”.

Now we have a little more clarity over what is in our backlog. The previously undifferentiated jumble is a bit more orderly. We can now pull work knowing a few new things:

  1. What projects we are really working on
  2. What we are completing (and what we are procrastinating on).
  3. What work we need to schedule for and what work can simply flow
  4. Which tickets are still scary

headings with backlogPerhaps the most important thing is that the cognitive load of the original backlog was enormous. That added to our work-in-progress. The cognitive load of this new organized backlog (no matter how you feel about doing your taxes or cleaning) is much less. Your brain is spending less time and energy trying to make sense of what’s coming up.

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HOW TO: Limit Your Work-in-Progress #1–Calm Down and Finish

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Jim Benson

We had a long series, which is soon to become a mini-book, on why you should limit your work-in-progress (WIP). In it we focused on the dangerous side effects of being overworked, of which there are many. Those articles show how an organization might begin to limit WIP, but not really the individual.

And, since this is the Personal Kanban site after all, we should probably talk about how we, as individuals, can limit our WIP.

For this first post, we’re going to start with the simplest answer. The sports shoe answer – just do it.

2010-12-21 11.09.08The key to just doing anything is not doing everything else. David Allen promotes a “stop doing” list to compliment a “to do” list. In that vein, here we don’t want to prematurely end tasks you are working on an never revisit them, but we do want to postpone some tasks so that other can be completed. In the beginning, a large part of our READY column will be populated with tasks we know we already started, but are setting aside to focus on the few tasks in WIP.

Calm Down

The first thing to do here is to recognize that the work you are setting aside will get done. In fact, by setting it aside and waiting to complete the tasks in Doing, you will likely get it done sooner than if you didn’t defer it in the first place.  So, calm down, your current fears of delayed completion are due to how long its taken you to finish things in the past – in a non-WIP limited world.

Why was it so hard before?

We covered this in the Why Limit WIP Series:

When we limit our WIP, we are able to focus, complete faster (much faster), and likely have an end product of higher quality.

We’ve been told over the years that productivity is a good thing. However, true productivity means completing things of quality – not simply doing lots of things at the same time and completing very little.

It should be common sense that if we focus on one thing, we will complete it faster.

We need to lose our irrational fear of not being productive, and replace that with embracing being effective.

So calm down, take a look at the task at hand, focus on it, and finish.

A Note

This will work most of the time. However, there are some complexities. We want to know:

  • What is the right thing to work on?
  • What is standing in my way of completion?
  • How large of tasks should I be taking on?
  • I have so many people counting on me, how do I tell some of them to wait?
  • I’m interrupted so many times a day, how can I focus?

We will cover these in upcoming posts.

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The Pen: The Handoff Column

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Jim Benson

Modus Board with the PenIn our work, we have tasks we need to do, tasks we are doing, and tasks we’ve completed. We know we have a WIP limit and that we shouldn’t exceed it. But tasks aren’t always as tidy as we’d like. We don’t just start tasks and work until they’re DONE. Tasks, very often, involve input from others over whom we have little or no control.

For this purpose, Tonianne and I use THE PEN. In the board to our right (our actual board), you can see that Toni started working on getting a contract amended and then had to send that off for review and comment. While it’s gone, we don’t want to take her away from her other tasks. So she’s moved it into The Pen where it will reside until the outside party has done their bit.

We are blessed on this day to only have one item in THE PEN. Ordinarily we have five or six. When they stack up, it’s a sign that we’ve let them linger too long and should follow up on the tickets. We will also, if need be, set a deadline or a reminder on tasks in THE PEN. Today, that’s not the case – she’s reasonably sure that she’ll get a reply sometime by the end of the week.  However, if tasks are going to sit in THE PEN for a long time or if there is a deadline we have to meet, we will certainly set a date to check on it.

We want to limit our WIP to lighten our cognitive load and let us focus. However, we will often find ourselves in a position where we have several things waiting action by others. It’s okay to sequester these tasks and move ahead with active work.

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Do The Right Small Thing

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Jim Benson

171463865_36ee36f70e_qWhen you look at your Personal Kanban, do you have tasks like “Do the Dishes” or are they more like “Build a House”?

If they’re more like the latter, ask yourself why.

Good Things Are Completed In Small Packages

Lean thinking asks us, in industry speak, reduce our batch sizes. This is their way of saying we should find tasks that can be completed quickly, effectively, and without many surprises.

We are more likely, whether at work or at home, to complete small tasks than large ones. Why?

They’re Small – First off, small tasks are simply that. They’re small. We can therefore complete them in less time.

They’re Understandable – Small tasks are easy to grasp. We can easily envision what needs to be done, how much uninterrupted time it should take, and what the end state will look like.

They are Stable – If a small task is something we can get done quickly, it means the chance of interruption is less and the potential number of complications is low. With most of our work, interruptions actually provide the most complication. That complication adds instability to our estimates.

They are not Scary – Large tasks, because we know full well that they are instable, are frightening. They evoke our fear response,  making us procrastinate, making us spend more time planning how to mitigate risk, and distracting us while actually doing the work. Small tasks, because we understand them and they are stable are much less scary.

We are Confident – A small, stable, and understandable task is something we can promise to someone else and feel confident about the promise.

We can Knock Them Out – Think about how good a day feels when you move a lot of tickets off your Personal Kanban. Now, think of days where nothing moving. Sluggish movement on the Personal Kanban makes us feel sluggish as well.

Small Deliveries Make a Big Delivery

When  we start a large project (and there certainly are large projects) we need to look at that project and figure out what the units of value are in it. Is this project something that has to be done all at once? Are there elements of this project that can be delivered quickly to provide value along the way? What do my customers really want from this project? What is the likelihood of interruptions causing me to shelve this project for long periods of time? Can I come back to this project and remember where I was?

If we can divide the project into smaller pieces of deliverable interim value, then we can can start enjoying some of the benefits of the big task – even if is has yet to be fully realized.

Say you have a big project that is: renovate the basement. This involves moving everything out of the basement, ripping out the walls, moving plumbing, putting in new walls, putting in floors, doing new electrical, painting, getting new furniture, and then enjoying the basement.

Many people look at that task and say, “That’s big, I’d like to do that, but I don’t have time.”

There are smaller tasks there, however. The first might be, “Go through basement and donate all unused or unwanted items.” (For some of us, even this is a big task).  After that might come a task of “Get a new sofa” or even “Draw up basement plans”. Each of these provides immediate value and may well change the outcome for the larger project. Say you get rid of the clutter in the basement and find, lo and behold, there’s a lot more room down there now.

Now, instead of gutting the basement, you can do a few coats of paint, a few simple repairs, and you have a much more livable space.

Throughput of the Small

In my own life, I had a huge office with people working in it every day for 10 years. I also had a home studio where I had been both working and writing for 10 years. When I closed the office, I was left with 10 years of combined office and home paperwork and other junk.

I set aside a plan where each day I needed to take out one wastebasket worth of recycling. Over the course of a few months (I travel a lot), I was able to work my way through the mountain of combined personal, Modus, and Gray Hill history. If I had sat down and done that large task all in one sitting, it would have left me unable to write or work for clients. It would have been boring and, likely, I would have lost interest mid-way through and started just picking up huge piles of paper and shredding it without looking at it.

Using a small task throughput model like this, where I do a little a time, I could keep focus, work my way to completion, and not have to worry about the huge daunting task.

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