The Kaizen Resolution

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Jim Benson

If you are a typical New Year’s resolver, you’ve just taken on a large, daunting, personal transformation project. You want to lose weight or be nicer or play for the Celtics. Good for you!

But if you are also typical you (a) haven’t been too successful at this resolution in the past and have recycled it (b) have good intentions but no plan and (c) are doing this entirely alone.

We mentioned my 10,000 steps rule. I have lost track of it after a few years of doing really well, some years of going pretty good, and lately a few years of saying “Oh today I actually did it”. During the years I did really well, I was using an on-line tool called Walker Tracker and, together with my friends like Ed Vielmetti and Prentiss Riddle I walked the equivalent of Seattle to Phoenix by way of San Diego.

When we all drifted away from the tool, I lost the community and, therefore, focus.

This year, I am resolving the more amorphous “be healthier.” This involves three things: eat better, exercise more, and see friends. These are also amorphous. I cannot treat these like projects, but I can treat them as the focus of my Kaizen events. None of these things require undue coordination, but they do require focus.

What is Kaizen? Kaizen, in its essence, is continuous improvement. It is an internal drive to constantly be making things better. I want to do okay this week, a little better next week, a little better the week after that.

What I don’t want is to over-commit to something far outside my routine. Business does this all the time. They call it a “re-org” – meaning they are radically reorganizing the processes, structure, and culture of the company. They usually fail.

Why? Because they’ve done so much change at once they shocked the system. In 1998, after a decade of being a vegetarian, I decided to start eating meat again. How did I do this? Well, I ate half a chicken. It was delicious. It nearly destroyed me – rather than introducing small amounts of meat into my system, I shocked it with a large amount of change it literally could not digest.

Don’t do that.

With Kaizen we want to make small incremental changes. In this case, we want to pick up new habits that benefit our New Year’s goals. For this, we can use our Personal Kanban. Let’s say that for these habits, we do two things:

1. Remind ourselves of the habits

2. Invent small, obtainable projects to get you there.

clip_image002So, we have a habits swim lane. Note that we’ve identified a bunch of habits we’d like to achieve this year in the ready column, but right now we’re just working on a few. While those blue habits are “in progress”, we have blue actions in our working kanban.

So we see that we have in our swimlane “exercise more”. (Fitting that it’s in a swim lane). So here’s where life gets interesting. Our first task is to find an exercise buddy – someone with whom we can create some social pressure and some support to actually do this exercising. We find Jill, who’s totally ready to exercise – but we find that she’s into hot yoga and not treadmills at the gym.

After some discussion, we agree to go with her to hot yoga.

If you had pre-decided that the only way for you to lose weight was with treadmills at the gym, you would have bought a lot of new clothes and shoes and a gym membership. Now, you are looking at the best yoga studio. You had patience, and looked for the best options.

Remember, your New Year’s Resolution is a goal. It is an end state you would like to achieve. There are many paths to your end-state. If you over-commit to one particular path, you greatly reduce your chances of success. Flexibility – especially in something as fuzzy as a New Year’s Resolution – is vital.

Set yourself up for success. Build habits naturally. Don’t force change, but embrace it.

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Two Personal Kanban Resolution Ideas

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Jim Benson

Happy 2013!

Most people I know don’t even make New Year’s Resolutions anymore, and when they do – they are perfunctory and amorphous. I will lose weight, I will exercise more, I will grow wings and fly like a bat.

But these are all as unlikely as they are amorphous, and they are unlikely because they are amorphous. I, for example, have had a long standing goal to walk 10,000 steps. This can sometimes (or quite often) be a challenge in Seattle when it’s often drizzly and cold. In July, I crush my goal! But I can’t have a yearly goal in one month.

When we make resolutions that are difficult to achieve, we do really well at them for a while and then something happens – the weather changes or we get sick or we go on a trip. That breaks the flow of the resolution and we stop doing it. We try to do it from time to time, but that’s not quite the same.

I’ve seen people be very successful at small New Year’s Resolutions like “this year I will clean the garage” because these resolutions are easy to grasp, schedule for, and complete.

We can only complete our New Year’s goals if they are (a) a small project that we can focus on and complete or (b) a new habit we can intelligently weave into our daily lives. So here at Personal Kanban we have two recommendations we’ll talk about today, one is the Kaizen Resolution, the other is Small New Years Projects.

And if you are wondering, I waited until after the first to write this because I figured that about now people would be like … well, I made the resolution .. now what?

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The Pen: Managing Stalled Tasks

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Jim Benson

This question is from an interview I just did with an internal magazine with ExileSoft, a Sri Lankan company. The question has been haunting me, though, so I’m extending my reply in this post.

Thushara’s question:

“I started to practice Personal Kanban. But I got stuck at some point.  I ended up having too many tasks in the “Pen” which never moved.  (This interview was a good example. It was there over 9 months). What should I do?”

Answer:

When we first created THE PEN to allow us to sequester tasks delayed by forces beyond our control, we realized that it ran the risk of becoming a sinkhole – a place where work would fall never to be seen again.The Pen Personal Kanban

Here we see a kanban with a THE PEN column. The ticket in there says “Schedule Plumber”. If we didn’t have a column like THE PEN our DOING column would quickly become mired in work that wasn’t complete – but we could not work on.

So THE PEN is necessary in Personal Kanban, but, as Thushara has found, it doesn’t stay looking nice and neat like this for long. It fills up with every promise someone has ever made to us and we’re left with the visual record of eternal repeating disappointment.

Okay, maybe it’s not that bad.

But, for us, half exercised options (which is what a half-done task is) are unacceptable. So, we have a few rules of thumb:

MAKE THEM ACTIONABLE: Items in THE PEN should either be obviously waiting on work by others and have born on and revisit dates. When you move something to THE PEN, note when it went in, why it is there, and when you should revisit it.

FINISH BEFORE START: Always look at your Pen before your pull a new task. Clean your house before you buy new things.

WIP LIMITS: Set limits on the Pen – both for age and for number of tasks. When you reach a limit, you need to place concerted effort in getting rid of those tickets.

ASK WHY: If you see tasks backing up ask yourself  “Why are these in THE PEN?” Because, you know what? If you didn’t have the Personal Kanban … it would still be stuck. You’d just forget about it over time. So, is it in the pen because it isn’t relevant anymore? Is it there because a project didn’t get finished?

ACT:You need to act on those tickets. You can do one of the following:

  1. Nothing – If you are honestly waiting on someone and there is nothing you can do, then leave it in THE PEN.
  2. Refresh – Contact the people on the card(s) and remind them that you are waiting
  3. Escalate – If there is an escalation path (someone to involve of higher rank to increase the urgency of the task for others) bring them in. If there is not, contact the people who are holding up the work and make the ticket’s value for you very clear to them.
  4. Push – You have a pull system but others do not. If a card is stuck simply because others are procrastinating or don’t care – take the card to them and work it off your board.
  5. Recategorize – If this task is not waiting for a person to do something, but for an event to happen (like a trade show or a deliverable deadline) that is forseeable and in the future, declare this task done and make a new ticket for follow up at that later date which can go in your backlog.
  6. Kill it – If the option value for this task has expired or the coordination costs are too high, you can decide that ticket is done and contact the people letting them know you’ve had to kill it.

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Managing Sandy’s Aftermath: Emergency Response Personal Kanban

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Jim and Tonianne

Hurricanes do not respect WIP limits.

Despite our best efforts, there are simply some instances where we cannot limit our work-in-progress. Forces beyond our control seem to conspire to control us. Natural disasters are unfortunately well-suited for this – they have little or no respect for our carefully controlled WIP.

When we’re smack in the middle of an emergency like Hurricane Sandy, it seems all we can do is react to immediate needs: which windows to avoid crashing tree limbs, what doors to insulate against rising and rushing water, where to seek shelter should evacuation become imminent. Once the storm passes, we’re left to contend with a heretofore unimaginable trail of destruction – to our homes, to our businesses, to our mental well-being.

It is at the most emotional of moments that we find ourselves forced to make vital decisions. What do I do first? Where do I begin? Will I ever get out from beneath this overwhelming physical and psychological debris?

In the Personal Kanban book, we discuss a design pattern which doesn’t quite resemble a “typical” Personal Kanban. In the aftermath of an emergency, the “Emergency Response Approach” helps us:

  • Visualize all the work needed to respond to the situation at hand;
  • Understand the complexity of the situation;
  • Track the states of completion for most important and intricate tasks;
  • Compile notes during the completion of those tasks;
  • Keep a written record of how we dealt with the emergency;
  • Dynamically re-prioritize tasks based on shifts in need or context; and
  • Understand our options.

As you can see here, we created this matrix-style kanban with the goal of seeing all our work and ensuring that when we are finished we’ve lost no information in the process. We chose to go extremely low-tech – just flipchart paper and pen – not only because an online kanban would require electricity, but also because with a sticky note-based Personal Kanban the stickies could easily become detached, causing vital information to become lost.

In an emergency situation, this kanban becomes your war room.

Your “value stream” – the steps it takes to complete a task – might look something like this:

Task → Begun → Assembling → Assembled → Active → Complete → Notes

Begun: If it’s been started (you’ve begun to work on the task).
Assembling: If it’s being assembled (you’re gathering paperwork or other requirements).
Assembled: If it’s been assembled (requirements are complete).
Active: If it’s being processed (by you, or you’re waiting for someone else to act).
Complete: If it’s complete.

Use the Notes column for points of contact, policy numbers, additional resources etc.

One of the major elements of this design pattern is its tolerance for beginning some tasks while allowing others to remain incomplete. Why would we advocate not limiting WIP when that is one of Personal Kanban’s fundamental rules?

During an emergency, opportunities to begin tasks are actually valuable.

Ordinarily, we want to limit our work-in-progress and complete each task before a new one begins. In this case, there are way too many complicated tasks to undertake, too many coordination points, and too many things to do.

This is multitasking by necessity, but it’s controlled multitasking. With a to-do list, we’d have an accounting of the tasks, but we wouldn’t understand their state or be able to limit our WIP. The Emergency Response Approach includes includes a few helpful features that are designed to overcome the limitations of a to-do list.

It works like this:

  1. In the Task column, write down everything you need to do. For the moment, don’t worry what size the tasks are. Just get them out of your head and onto your kanban.
  2. Look at your Taskcolumn and begin working on the highest priority task.
    1. Note that you’ve started by writing a check mark in the Assembling column.
    2. Assemble all the items you need to actually complete the task (insurance numbers, phone numbers, pictures of damage, etc)
    3. When you are done mark with a check mark that you’ve Assembled everything and can begin working on the task in earnest. This task is now Active.
  3. Once a task is Active, take notes directly on the kanban in the Notes field (it’s okay to spill out). Our goal here is after everything is done, your emergency kanban is a one-stop-shop for what happened, when it happened, and how it happened.
  4. When the task is Complete, mark it and move on.

It’s important to note:

  • You’ll have many tasks in-flight at once;
  • You’ll be interrupted by other tasks constantly;
  • You’ll never finish them in priority order;
  • There will be many more tasks than you initially expected;
  • You’ll need to remember details later that don’t necessarily matter to you right now;
  • You are doing heroic things right now. This tool is here to help you keep track of what happened; and
  • There are things you will miss, and that’s okay.

Your goal right now is to get your life back to normal. We hope this tool helps you through this difficult time and invite you to feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Image from Hurricane Sandy courtesy of Casual Capture  whom we hope is okay.

 

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Learning: Why Limit Your WIP X

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Jim Benson

In “Creating an Economy” we discussed four elements we needed to understand to build our economy. The third was that knowledge work involves learning.

Knowledge workers need to learn – they learn by doing, by observing, by experimenting, by reading, and by adjusting.

Doing – We learn best by directly experiencing. If I have a four hour powerpoint presentation about how to play Super Mario Brothers, you will understand that my little pixelated guy can jump on things, that sometimes he’s big and sometimes he’s small, and that there are coins around. But you would learn much more simply playing the game. Knowledge workers learn a considerable amount just by starting and beginning to work on a project. Through doing we understand the coherence of our work

Observing – There is much in the average project to observe. Some tasks are easy, others more difficult. Some things we are expecting to work well, do not. There are personal conflicts. Through interested observation, we become aware.

Experimentation – In our doing and our observations we note discrepancies between the way things are and potential, more ideal, ways they could be. We build hypotheses about why these are. We experiment to see if our hypotheses are correct. If they are not, then we learn and try again. If they are, we learn, we are happy, and move on to the next thing to fix.

Reading – Or watching a lecture. But when we are aware – we have a better idea of where the gaps in our knowledge are. We can engage in directed learning because we know, rather than just learn because of current management fads or because someone orders us to. In this case, reading or classes augment our observations and experiments.

Adjusting – Learning is humbling. It makes us reassess our current processes and replace them with other ones. Sometimes learning comes with epiphanies. Sometimes adjustments are minor.

Limiting WIP and Learning: The Onset of Agency

Limiting WIP gives us the flow and coherence we’ve discussed throughout this series. It is not a panacea, but it is an extremely powerful tool. Consider is a pre-requisite more than a cure-all. If you, your team, or your company is not limiting work-in-progress, then they are likely distracted, overburdened, and unlikely to innovate.

Limiting WIP is not going to instantly and magically create a magic workforce. Anyone making claims that any out-of-the-box process will instantly result in hyper-productivity is a snake oil salesman.

What limiting WIP will do, however, is promote the growth of something called agency.

When Eldred began to see himself setting policy by starting working groups, when he became comfortable with the thought of completion, he was gaining agency.

The trick here was that none of the project managers could truly provide Eldred agency. They also didn’t have the authority. Only Markus Blume could truly give the people in the company the ability to act on their ideas. He had to set policies and expectations that would both support that decision making and not hinder it.

Limiting work-in-progress was vital in this effort because overloaded people simply don’t have the understanding necessary to make thoughtful change. To be sure, overloaded people can come up with endless suggestions for change – but it’s unlikely to be thoughtful. It’s more likely to be reactive to their overload.

 

This is post 10 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. See the index for all 10.

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Communication: Why Limit WIP IX

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Jim Benson

“Good morning, Eldred.”

“Good morning, Markus.”

Before Markus came on board, there was zero contact with the CEO. Maybe at the Christmas party. He was more like a movie star – someone you recognized but didn’t dare approach. Certainly not someone who would know your name.

Markus, on the other hand, was a regular at stand-up meetings. He’d participate, but not dictate. It was like he was actually interested.

For months now, Team B had been regularly releasing features for the product. Now, the team was suspiciously close to … delivering.

Team B

Markus comes into Team B’s space and looks up at the kanban. He sees directly what’s in process, what’s done, and what is almost done.

He says to Eldred, “That looks good!”

There was no briefing. There was no status meeting. He can see that work is flowing. That two tasks are completed and three more are in acceptance testing. Soon they’ll be ready as well. No tickets are marked as blocked or as a problem.

The team is within their WIP limits – 2 for design, 2 for development, 4 for acceptance.

Eldred says with a smile, “If the box design is out of development today, the rest is easy. We have a working session on that today. I think we’ll knock it out.”

After years of shoddy or no releases, they are releasing something after a matter of months – and that feels good.

Communication and Limiting WIP

The WIP limits for the team enable flow of work, they also limit the work being undertaken to a reasonable level. On Team B’s board, Marcus is able to quickly grasp what is going on – so can the members of Team B, so can members of Team A. Everyone can see the simple story that is this project.

That instant information transfer from kanban means that no one on the team had to tell Markus their status. Since nothing is blocked or shows a status of pain, there is no need to talk about them in depth. Eldred mentioned one feature in particular, because it was relevant and he was excited about it.

Time consuming communication can now be reserved for things people actually need to talk about.

In addition, the board is always on. If something becomes blocked or in danger, the board communicates that too.

Without limited WIP, the board’s conversation becomes much less compelling. We never know if people are overburdened. We will likely have an incomprehensible number of tickets on the board. Tickets will enter the board and languish for long periods of time. When questioned, people will say, “Yeah, I’m just not working on that right now” and will continue to say that as the board fills with the trivial and the catastrophic.

The healthy constraint of limiting WIP creates a coherent message that is instantly communicated to all.

 

This is post 9 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. See the index for all 10.

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Awareness: Why Limit WIP VIII

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Jim Benson

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline,
that’s important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences. ~ Dalai Lama

below the water lineSelf-discipline with the awareness of consequences.

When we become self-aware, we shed learned helplessness. The inability to act is replaced by the polar opposite – a desire to act.

We have seen the repeated with teams that previously had given up. A corporate culture of failure acceptance is created and is so pervasive that people say, “continuous improvement is impossible in my culture.”

What we’ve seen, however, is quite different. People that have been in a low-trust, punitive environment where action is shunned do develop learned helpless and they do shut down, BUT … they create pent-up demand for change. They may have learned that they can’t help now, but they’re STILL THERE.

So Eldred is still there, even though he was beaten down by years of five projects. Eldred is still there.

For years, Eldred has had to keep only the self-discipline of not going insane being pulled in so many directions. The structure of the company limited his ability to have the self-discipline of good product development and completion. Eldred never had to be aware of consequences. Other than internal political ones, he was sheltered.

Now, Eldred is a little scared. He recognizes that now Team B is on the hook for completing a product. A real product. To be really released to real buyers. And, not only that, he recognizes that Markus Blume isn’t going to tell him, or his project manager, what to do.

Eldred is also aware that no one got laid off. There was so much work not being done that the staffing still seems insufficient even for just these two projects. How is that possible?

Eldred is becoming aware.

Eldred sees that he could suggest working groups to get out features faster. It might work. He’s always wanted to try it, but never could because even he couldn’t commit to it. It’s an experiment, but … it just might work.

Don’t Be the Costa Concord

When teams become aware, they tend to want to make decisions.

Risk-averse people (management and workers alike) tend to fear this shift because it means that decisions are made by people not in authority. The issue here is that we’ve had this pendulum so well stuck at the other end of the spectrum that no one can make decisions at all.  Small, daily course corrections for projects and the company should not require edicts from the highest of authorities.

The rule of thumb that we’ve used is something called the water line.

If you are about to make a decision, ask yourself, is this fails does it poke a hole in our corporate ship above or below the water line?

If it’s above – we just say, “ooops,” we patch it and we move on.

If it’s below – we should have a conversation or set of conversations with those in command of the ship so they can either say, “Um, let’s not do that” or “Okay, let’s do it and we’ll prepare if something goes wrong.”

And yes, that’s vague.

In general, there are going to be three water-line zones.

Obviously safe, obviously dangerous, and that annoying transition band in-between.

As the work force is transitioning to becoming more fully aware of their actions and their potential consequences, you might have a transgression or two. However, we’ve never seen a ship sunk because of awareness.

What is more likely is that ships no awareness end up like the Exxon Valdez.

Eldred’s Unexpected Bonus

Limiting WIP for Eldred and Team B has led to a keener understanding of their product. They have been able to focus, as they are each only working on a very few tasks at a time. Extremely limited context switching has raised the productivity of the group. Increased project coherence has made them much more effective (they know what they are building and why).

Greater awareness is creating an efficient operation. They can see inefficiencies, they have more time to talk to customers, and they have a shared understanding for the product itself.

 

This is post 8 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. See the index for all 10.

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Focus: Why Limit Your WIP VII

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Jim Benson

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~ Mark Twain

DerekKanban

Eldred comes into work on Monday. He is instantly besieged by requests for work, information, meetings, and product from all five of his teams. His co-workers, his bosses, his clients all need things from him now.

Eldred cannot judge the relative importance of these requests. It’s possible, in fact, that they are all equally valuable. Therefore, there is no clear direction for him to take.

Eldred calls his five bosses together and cries out, “Just tell me what to do!”

Eldred’s Got No Focus

Knowledge work happens within our brains. It is a product of the mind. Without imagination, without insight, without inspiration, it is simply work.

Value creation includes the work creation for a reason. It’s not value reproduction. Or value copying. Knowledge workers create. They invent. The innovate.

When we lose our ability to focus, we greatly impair our ability to do these things. We become reactive. We begin to ask bosses things like: “tell us what to do.”

What’s worse, we believe that’s what we want.

As a boss, if your employees or team members are asking that question – you know they have no focus.

Learned Helplessness

When people specifically ask someone else to tell them what to do, one thing is quite clear:

THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

As the person who is directing knowledge workers, I have bad news for you.

This is your fault, and you need to fix it.

Eldred’s bosses all start to argue. They all have the highest need for Eldred right now. Things are behind and they, personally, cannot abide any more delays.

Not only does this create an unnecessary meeting of people to argue about Eldred’s time – it also is a playhouse of something psychologists call “Learned Helplessness.”

Learned helplessness comes from situations where we feel we are utterly powerless to act.

An example of this for me comes from the 7th grade. We had an algebra teacher who was a tyrant. After I had the flu, I sat for an exam that I utterly bombed. When I went to him for help, he told me I should study harder. When I said that I had been sick, he told me that wasn’t his problem. I had nowhere to turn and my shame made me not approach my peers. Whenever I talked to the teacher, he let me know this was my problem. My lack of understanding of things at the beginning of the class led to me falling farther and farther behind, ultimately I failed the class – believing it was all due to my inability to learn algebra.

I was convinced this was my substandard brain.

My parents were concerned, but also were under the impression that this was just Jimmy “not applying himself.”

But then they went over to Fred and Donna’s for dinner. They were eating with a group of parents of my friends. Someone mentioned their kid had failed algebra and they were disappointed. My parents said, “Really, us too!” Soon the whole table was filled with the parents of apparent algebra dunces. Coincidence?

Root cause discovered, they went to the school and demanded to have us re-tested at the end of the summer.  The school, who apparently didn’t notice the flood of failing grades before, said, “Sure, whatever.”

And the lot of us found ourselves getting algebra tutoring over the summer. … and oddly enjoying it.

We all tested at the end of the summer, got our A’s and went on with our lives.

But to this day, math upsets me. I still feel that learned helplessness and can’t shake it.

Why Eldred Can’t Read

Learned helplessness is insidious. Eldred and his bosses and his co-workers have been buried under a mountain of work. They can not see the mountain. They would not have the authority to react to the mountain even if they could.

Lucy is not going to just sit up and say, “You know, this company has too much work. I’m going to kill my project and give my people to the other projects.” First, it’s her job on the line. Second, why her and not someone else? Third, she likely believes her project (as do the others) is the most important. Fourth, she simply lacks the authority to make that kind of determination. And fifth, she and the other project managers are not paid to sit around second guessing corporate decisions.

Eldred is in an even worse situation. He cannot get away from any of his five projects. He knows they are all doomed. He is also quite convinced that nothing he can do will improve the situation – because he is also convinced of the necessity of all five projects and his role in them.

Learned helplessness here means that rather than attack the root cause of the company’s problems (too many projects in flight) – the groups work on treating symptoms as if they are problems.

We see Eldred and his colleagues exhibiting new traits: they appear anxious, less talkative, or depressed. They begin to say things like, “Just tell me what to do.” Managers often like this and will give them direct orders. The workers will then merely do their task – never ask for the context and never work to make things better.

This means that tasks begin to more and more be done without an understanding of the actual end goals. The tasks may be completed in a way that meets the description of the work – but does not actually fit into the final product. This creates more work at the end of a project to make ill-fitting work fit into a final product – causing more delays, rework, and shoddy product.

That, in turn, creates more learned helplessness.

Limiting WIP as a Cure for Learned Helplessness

Eldred comes to work on Monday and finds that the company has been bought by a new CEO. His name is Markus Blume. Blume walks into the office and declares, “My word! This company has a lot of goals and no products!” Everyone fidgets.

Markus says, “You know what? I think it would be a capital idea if we all shelved about half this stuff for Q1 and just focused on completing some things.”

Silence.

This guy is clearly mental.

Everyone, from the project managers to the rank and file, are aghast. “You can’t postpone projects C, D, and E! They are important!”

Eldred gives an impassioned speech for D especially.

Markus looks simultaneously disgusted and amused.

“Of course they are important. But .. just say for a second we actually finish something. Wouldn’t that be important?”

Blank stares greet him. Everyone knows that this company doesn’t actually release things. They’ll just lay people off.

But, learned helplessness works in Mr Blume’s favor. Everyone goes and does what they are told.

Teams are re-formed. Lots of work is put on the back burner, but the front burners are turned way up.

Two new, larger and dedicated, teams are directed at projects A and B. A third team, called the Deming team, is built to look around the company and notice where things can be improved. Years of panic-driven management has resulted in tons of bad process, horrible systems, and neglected tasks. The Deming team is there to remove the bad constraints, create healthy ones, and clean up the mess.

Eldred is steaming mad for losing project D, the fact that it is scheduled for later in the year is of little comfort. He knows his project, project B, will be delayed just like always.

Tuesday, Eldred shows up and gets to work on Project B. At the end of the day, he is still dealing with the loss of project D. So much so that he hardly notices that he was very productive that day.

Wednesday, the B team gathers and talks about strategy. They haven’t even been given a deadline! They feel rudderless. How are they going to finish without a deadline? Surely this will take forever.

Maybe they need to invent their own goals, someone suggests.

And they do.

 

This is post 7 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. See the index for all 10.

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Healthy Constraints: Why Limit Your WIP VI

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Jim Benson

Great floods have flown from simple sources. ~ William Shakespeare

flood before and afterWhen we employ healthy constraints, we encourage flow. In the economy we create, our goal is create a flow of work that results in a flow of value creation that in turn results in a flow of revenue that enables us to keep up with the flow of work.

Healthy Constraints – Flow

As with a river, the right constraints make healthy flow. We have a garden on the shore, as commercial boats travel up and down the waterway. In this controlled environment, we enjoy predictability and they ability to act.

In this case, the healthy constraints on the river give us the first picture. Water is tamed and the couple are enjoying the view.

No Constraints – Flooding

When the river does not adhere to these constraints, we get destructive flooding. Water goes everywhere. There is no predictability. Rather than having a garden, we spend our team reacting to the flood waters, working to avoid destruction rather than create value.

In this case, a lack of constraints caused by too much WIP (water in progress?) caused destructive flooding which not only drove the couple inside, but also utterly destroyed the beautiful garden.

Too Many Constraints – Diminished Flow

The other extreme would be a huge dam upstream from the property which would remove all water from the river. This would leave a big muddy mess, no commercial boat traffic, and no view for the couple to enjoy.

Balance and Healthy Constraints

When we limit our work-in-progress, we are seeking to place healthy constraints into our work economy that promotes healthy flow.

Too Much: If we limit our WIP too much, we will be single mindedly working on one task at a time and ignoring all else – with large potential social costs. We will dry up our ability to converse. We will over-focus.

Not Enough: No WIP limiting creates the flood of work we see every day.

Balance: You know, there’s a reason that they call it a “balancing act.” The world spins on its axis as it hurtles through space. Our continents are all inexorably continuing their drifting ways. Tectonic plates cause tremors in the most stable of locations.

Change is constant. Disruptions are the norm. Balance, forever and without fail, is impossible.

Understanding what it is we are balancing – that’s vital.

What Makes a Healthy Constraint

If you’re interested in ‘balancing’ work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable. ~ Donald Trump

Yes, that’s right, even Donald Trump gets it.

When we go to balance, we need to understand that creating too many rules (constraints) is self-defeating. Each rule that we add is another brick in the dam of our river. Yes, it can control the flow – but it’s a brick. Once it’s there, you can only remove it with force and the removal will have impacts.

So, as the Donald is suggesting, sometimes the creation of a healthy constraint is based on your point of view.  Often limiting work-in-progress does not require us to make new rules, but to simply accept that overloading ourselves is counter-productive.

Simply setting a WIP limit on our Personal Kanban or our team kanban, is a visual indicator of our commitment to this minimal constraint.

DerekKanban

This Personal Kanban shows the minimal constraint of Derek Huether’s WIP limit of 3. In this board, if Derek were to run into a situation where he had to pull a 4th item into his WIP column – he can do that.

Derek has taken no blood-oath saying he will never exceed his WIP limit. This is healthy constraint – not a law.

This flexibility gives Derek the freedom and autonomy to deal with situations as they arise. The forth work item in WIP will not make him pay a fine or cost him his job – but it will make him very aware that he is violating the constraint and that there will be penalties for completion time and quality of the items currently in-flight.

He will also work, as quickly as possible, to get back to his WIP limit of 3.

To drive this point home: let’s quickly definite healthy and unhealthy constraints:

Healthy Constraint: Does the minimum required to reward a desired behavior while retaining maximum flexibility.

Unhealthy Constraint: Codifies and makes mandatory desired behavior and limits flexibility.

 

This is post 6 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. See the index for all 10.

Personal Kanban image courtesy of Derek Huether

Flood image courtesy of Melissa Will

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Creating an Economy: Why Limit Your WIP V

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Jim Benson

“Stop starting and start finishing.” – David Anderson

You, right now, are disrespecting your ability to create amazing things.

You, right now, are doing more than you should, for more people than is optimal, and in an environment that is too distracting.

Well, odds are you are doing those things at any rate.

Why?

Because right now, odds are (overwhelmingly) that you have no idea the full extent of the tasks you’ve taken on, what you’ve actually left incomplete, and what the costs are for taking something else on.

Odds are also (overwhelmingly) that you’re a pretty decent person. You want to help people, you want to do a good job, and you are interested in interesting things.

With no penalty for saying, “no” – why would you?

Why would we ever say no to interesting, helpful incoming work. Especially when it’s just a little more? It’s just five or ten minutes. It’s just a little bit more work. And it’s sooooooooo delicious…..

Just like that one little Hershey’s Kiss won’t kill our diet … one more task surely won’t overload us.

But we have a scale – that shows us the impact of those chocolates. And we have a diet which regulates the flow of those chocolates. We built a system, with an economy, that shows that there is an exchange rate between chocolate eating and weight gain.

Limiting WIP creates that economy for our work. It shows us that there are direct penalties we pay for taking too much on. That our cognitive system degrades faster than our productivity improves. That the more work we take on, the less we complete.

Ignoring an Economy

In the global economic sense, we have seen that it is easy to overheat an economy and have it burn out with terrific penalties. So, too, can we see this in our daily lives. When there is no penalty to over-use a resource, we tend to do exactly that. In this case, it’s our own time.

In our personal lives and in knowledge work, we see regularly that we take on too much, we get bogged down, everything becomes an emergency or a missed opportunity. After a while, panic feels like the order of things, which is neither fulfilling personally nor professionally.

Whether we are individuals, teams, or companies, we see the opportunities available to us and want to exercise them. Now, if these opportunities all took up physical space, after a while we’d run out of room.

Each opportunity would come in a box, we’d store it in our To-Do room, and after a while the room would fill up. “I can’t fit anything else in,” we’d say, “come back later and I’ll get that done for you.”

Well, bad news for us. Promises are ephemeral. We can sit and make promises all day long. They take up no space.

Like carbon monoxide, promises are odorless, gaseous, and when they mount to dense enough concentrations – they kill us.

Like bundling bad B & C loans into tradable packages, we gather up these promises and shuffle them around, each promise initially buying us good favor – until their debt load becomes so great that our economy collapses around us.

Building an Economy

Economies actually work better when they have minimal, but responsible, constraints.

When we treated Eldred’s time as a limitless resource, we quickly overutilized him. Logical utilization based on Eldred’s time, simply didn’t work. Eldred’s time is more valuable, it seems, than we thought. Initially, we thought that time was important and Eldred simply plugged into it. Now we see that Eldred’s ability to think requires sensitivity to how he processes information.

Therefore, we have some elements to build an economy.

We understand that Eldred is an awesome knowledge worker and can produce a great stuff – as long as Eldred and those around him understand his work.

Our work economy needs to understand a few things:

1. Eldred interacts with his co-workers, his products, his bosses, and his clients. These interactions have rules, needs, and transaction costs.

2. Eldred’s work is knowledge work. Some days things go as planned. Some days things require him to put his head down and work out a problem. Some days, he needs to gather his co-workers and really pound on a sticky problem. Often these states change without notice.

3. Eldred is constantly needing to take in information, learn new things, process changes in context, and discuss this information with others. This means he needs to be able to focus, to build coherence in his work, and to complete.

4. Eldred is human. He gets weary (you know he do get weary). He interacts with other humans in and outside of his team. The interactions, information, and changes in context he is experiencing impacts his and others mood, psychological state, and ability to perform.

When our economy understands these things, we can begin to alter our working systems to support these parameters.

Limiting WIP in the New Economy

While there are many other elements to managing this economy, limiting work-in-progress is right at the forefront.

In this new economy, work-in-progress is a sacred element. We now understand that limiting Work-in-progress provides time to communicate, creates work coherence, and allows us to finish.

Further, we are beginning to understand the hidden costs of hyper-productivity. We are beginning to realize that understanding the nature of the work being done creates a more effective work force.

Lastly we are becoming aware that creating high quality products is preferable to creating low quality products.

What we are surprised to learn is that doing fewer things at the same time means we complete more things over the course of a year. Managing our working economy means we are able to release more, while doing less. Simply because we are spending more time working and less time context switching, status meeting, and reacting to delay.

This is post 5 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. See the index for all 10.

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