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.

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.

Some managers have to resort to public humiliation to get employees to submit their time sheets.

“Where is your time sheet?”

“I’ll get it to you.”

“But it was due two hours ago.’”

“Look, I’m really busy, okay, and I just don’t have time to figure out all that I did the past week.”

“Do you want to get paid?”

“Of course I do. Look  - I’ll get it to you … I just have to finish some things.”

Perhaps the single most annoying task for most workers is filling in their time sheet. Having worked for some of the largest consulting firms on earth, I have seen truly monstrous time tracking systems.  Painful, horrible, soul crushing, and pointless.

No one likes time sheets.

A recurring time sheet question goes something like this:

“Hey Jim, what did we do on Wednesday?  I’ve totally forgotten.”

Think about that. We blow through tasks so quickly that all too often what we’ve accomplished becomes a blur. We lose entire days, weeks, months of our lives to “work” we don’t even remember doing. I would call days you can’t remember waste.

How easy it would be to use a personal kanban and write the date of completion on each task when it’s done.  Place it in the “Timesheet” column.  At the end of the week, pick those tasks off the board, and record them.

Using a personal kanban for tracking those tasks:

• increases the accuracy of your time sheet,
• reduces the amount of time you spend completing the timesheet, and
• leaves you with a sense of accomplishment for actually having completed those tasks.

This transforms the time sheet into an opportunity for a quick retrospective. With the key word being quick.

Also consider: some tasks (like time sheets) seem like personal waste when they have no context. Sometimes you can mitigate waste by changing the context of the activity.

Photo cc. Charlee Brown