Your reputation hangs in the balance. Failure is not an option.

How can a chef create five dishes all at the same time with this much existential overhead? Is five not a WIP-busting number?

It’s the Iron Chef Paradox.

In the book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell invokes the “10,000 hour rule,”  based upon the research of sociologist Anders Ericcson that suggests if you do something for 10,000 hours you become an expert. But what does it mean to be an expert?

Our brains are pattern recognition devices. The more we practice something, the more we’re  able to process its intricacies efficiently and effectively. Whether it’s golf, cooking, or even empathy, practice creates proficiency.

So-called “Iron Chefs” do not see five dishes in progress. They do not see a WIP-busting workload. They see one meal for one group. The meal for them is a pattern.

They can see patterns foremost in the food itself. Chefs know what the current level of completeness is by sight. The food – for them – is a visual control. Simply looking at a fillet of sea bass on a grill from across the kitchen is sufficient. As it transforms from translucent to milky-white, the chef knows how close it is to done. This is known as prototype matching.  As we work through those 10,000 hours, we build up a library of pattern prototypes to recognize.

Understanding prototypes allows Iron Chefs to effectively prioritize under extreme duress. You put your rack of lamb on long before you plate your ice cream. Without understanding both the time and sequence of the patterns, effective prioritization is highly unlikely.

Patterns are all around us, we just need to sensitize ourselves to them. We need to be aware of what we are practicing and do it purposefully. With Personal Kanban, we have a visual control and can actually practice living. In the past, we just worked. Even though we‘ve all had a lifetime of starting and (sometimes) completing tasks, we’re often oblivious to the patterns and unaware of the prototypes of our work. Without recognizing these, without understanding how our choices impact our future, our WIP limits have been strained sending our stress levels through the roof.

Chefs like Bobby Flay understand the patterns and prototypes of cooking so well, they can create dessert out of tuna.

What can we  accomplish on a Saturday with a mixed backlog? What can we create with our colleagues at the office in a week? What patterns are there to help us recognize pitfalls and find success?

That was step one.

Step two is visualizing that FIP. Jessica was concerned because her triathlon regimen included both repetitive and non-repetitive tasks. She needed to consume the right amount of calories, be sure to take her meds, and of course work out. This would equate to three repetitive, monotonous tickets per day in Ready –> Doing –> Done.

Many tickets. Too little real information.

Getting the work done for the triathlon was of course, important, but Personal Kanban is built to be an information radiator. What was the real information she needed?  This turned out to be:

1. what workouts did I do
2. when did I do them
3. did my caloric intake match the workouts
4. did I take my meds and, most important
5. am I being consistent or missing anything?

So here we see Jessica’s board. She just had a little white board, so we worked with the walls in her home. Backlog and Done are both off the board (on the walls where the board hung). Her spontaneous tasks still work through a Ready –> Doing –> Done value stream, those tasks were color coded between work, family, studying and other tasks.  But there’s more here than that.

There are two additional “swim lanes” on this board. A swim lane is another value stream or dedicated horizontal lane on our board for special tasks.

The first swim lane is Triathlon Training. We have several metrics here:

Diet: each day net calories, water, and meds are measured. Calories are a number, meds and water are a checkmark for done.

Workout: Type, severity, and subjective well being are noted here. “20” is a 20 minute cardio. On Wednesday you can see “10 mile ride.” E,M,H are easy, medium and hard workouts. Smilies measure how Jessica subjectively felt about the workout.

She can then take these metrics and not only see adherence and progress, but also plan for future workouts.

The second swim lane is Jessica Studying for her Section 65 Certification. She told me that she studies by creating a study plan for herself, studying, and then testing herself on what she just did. So we set up a swim lane with a WIP of one. At any point, she can only be working on one module.

So with this, we took Jessica’s overwhelming combination of things in progress and goals and made them visible and actionable. Take the time to critically look at the different projects you have in flight. In the end, you want to get the work done, but your real aim is to understand what you’re doing. To get those projects done right, Jessica needed some dedicated swim lanes.

I’m willing to bet she’s not alone.

Visual Controls are Reminders

I’ve been surprised lately by the number of people asking me about work/life balance. We feel we are undervaluing our family ties, our personal goals, our community involvement, our hobbies and our art. Oftentimes our work makes us feel isolated – we feel alone and seek meaning in our lives. Amusingly, we feel like we’ve invented this feeling.

When people tell me that their generation is somehow unique in this feeling, I ask them to talk to their parents and their grandparents. Soon they discover it is merely a myth that takes just a few minutes to dispel. When your parents laugh at your hubris for an hour or so, it’s quite a gut-check.

Nonetheless, we can posit that we’ve managed to give ourselves a lot more controllable distractions than were there before. We just don’t control them very well.

So for this third post on Task Types, we’ll do some work/life balance tasks and, like we did with work tasks, we’ll establish some rules around them. Again, let’s use colors.

Let’s say that purple represents family time. Use purple stickies and note real family time – not that trip to Costco but rather, those things that your kids will look back on and remember with a smile.

Next, let’s have blue represent those things that need to be done for the family. These are tasks like, “Fix the leak in the downstairs bathroom” or “Mow the Lawn.”

Finally, let’s use green for aspirations. These are tasks like “Read the complete works of Vonnegut” or “Learn Personal Kanban” or “Get CPR Certificate.”

Sound good? Great! So what happens next?

These colored tasks can appear on your Personal Kanban as task types. You can then set up your balance – literally. Every day you can pull one purple. Every week you can pull two blue and two green. And in your DONE column, you can see where you are with your goals.

Work/life balance now has a shape and a color palette.

Having said this, I consider my work and my life as indiscrete parts of a continuum. I love what I’m doing at Modus and the people I’m doing it with. So for me, the balance comes from not becoming so enamored with Modus work that I forsake all other activities.  And, yes, I do need to work on this.

But, I will venture a guess that if you actively dislike what you do professionally, work/life balance will be unapproachable. You simply cannot dislike that much of your life and expect to achieve a healthy balance.

Photo by Robotography

Some things are hard to maintain

Yesterday we were introduced to Richard, who is juggling the demands of several clients trying to keep each of them happy. His largest project entails working alone on a client’s mission-critical legacy system. So in the last blog post we discussed his tasks and task types. As we discovered, outlining those task types proved invaluable to him when needing to communicate how he was working to meet his client’s requests.

In addition to needing to distinguish task types, Richard explained one of his biggest problems he faces is getting mired down in tasks where the solution was difficult to find. (Remember, the system he’s working on is undocumented, complex and the work of several coders – so interpreting what he’s reading is kind of like solving the DaVinci code every day.)

Interesting work perhaps, but it can eat into your personal life when tasks routinely cause you to work late.

When I asked him out of 20 tasks, how many are likely to go afield, he responded with a tentative “15.”

Holy moly – FIFTEEN!

Needless to say, 75% of something impacts process. You can plan for 75%. 75% is not an error, it is status quo.

Then I asked, “Does your client understand the miracles you are working?”

“Not really,” was his reply.

When the client doesn’t understand status quo, that’s also a problem.

So I explained how we needed to make these issues explicit for two reasons:

1. To Stop Richard from Becoming Mired Down We want to give Richard the ability to note a task as blocked, to identify the type of blockage, and to explore some options for action. (Note: the task may be blocked, right now that’s miring Richard down. We want to give him permission to move around.)

2. To Communicate Status on Specific Tasks We want the client know at all times, what’s going on.

First, we examine what the major blockage types are:

• Interaction Blockages – These tasks have begun and require help from an outside party, and
• Slogs – Tasks Richard has to slog through, alone.

So, just as we did with the task types in the previous post, a useful way to visualize these blockages is also with color.

Task types were specific to, and travel with, the tasks. If these types of blockages are rare, then they would also be task-specific. But at 75% they are actually part of the workflow. They are likely events in Richard’s regular working.

His workflow would go from this:

Personal Kanban with Stuck Work Taking up WIP

To this:

Personal Kanban with Stuck Columns

Richard allows himself an overall WIP limit of 2. But “Stucks” get so stuck that the only way he can move forward is to do other work until something happens that will unstuck a stuck. (release a stuck?) This results in exceeding his WIP limit because incomplete tasks wind up littering his value stream.

The new “stuck” columns are WIP-exempt and allow Richard to put active tasks in Coding, Testing, etc. while the stuck tasks are allowed – at least momentarily – to languish in the stuck areas.

Admittedly, this is totally not a preferred way of working. If Richard were anything other than a lone actor, I would do everything in my power not to suggest this. I would be looking for ways to bring teamwork to bare to solve these stuck tasks. But historically Richard has had no team to rely on, and it serves little purpose to have him try to force solutions when they are slow to come by design.

Again, with a full 3/4 of Richard’s tasks being put into a holding state due to complexity or the need for additional input, that activity needs to be visualized before it can be dealt with. We need to see the procedural breakdown to refine our understanding of it and then, and only then, can we hopefully deal with it.

Perhaps 70% of these stuck tasks deal with a few, identifiable areas of the system. Richard could then add up the time he’s spent working with those specific areas and approach his client with a suggestion that he actually re-write those areas from scratch. As Richard did so, he could document his code and adhere to a coding standard that was higher than the one the original authors adhered to. This in turn would make the code more maintainable and, in the end, remove 70% of future blockages, saving his client money and Richard future heartache.

I can’t stress this point enough – the goal here is to visualize what is really happening, and then do something about it. Without the assistance of visualization in this and the previous post, neither Richard nor his client could gain clarity into the complexity of Richard’s work load. Now that both he and his client have work types and are visualizing the tasks that are mired down, they can at long last make decisions that free Richard from long work hours and difficulties in estimation.

Now Richard can better schedule his work time and attempt to achieve the coveted albeit elusive work / life balance. Not surprisingly, tomorrow’s post will address this very topic.

Photo by Steve Jurvetson

Mrs Winchester's WIP

Flexibility is an unsung virtue. People want absolutes: “Do this, then do that, don’t deviate and then you’ll achieve success.” But we all know that absolutes are often false, and that context is king – in life, in work, and in all human endeavor.

So limiting our WIP needs to take context into account, even WIP limiting needs to be flexible. Sometimes tasks just don’t behave themselves. Some are extremely urgent, while others become mired down for whatever reason. Both of these scenarios demand respect.

I recently had a session with a personal coaching client who has just begun using Personal Kanban. He had set up a few rather detailed value streams, but was having trouble limiting his WIP because different task types were causing conflicts.

At Seattle Lean Coffee, the topic of task types has come up at almost every meeting.

It’s clear we need to talk about task types here.

So, let’s examine the case of a coder, whom we’ll call Richard.

A hired gun, with a busy home and work life, Richard is juggling multiple commitments. His primary client is a company that uses an esoteric software system to run their business. Not only is Richard one of only a few (less than 5) individuals on earth familiar with this particular package, the others are not interested in working with it any more.

Over the course of each month, Richard receives tasks from his client. These tasks come with some – but not rigorous – prioritization. Every so often though, a bug will surface that impacts the company’s operations, and Richard will need to drop what he’s doing and focus instead on that bug.

Over the years, the system Richard is “lucky” enough to be stewarding has been touched by a succession of coders resulting in a tangled mass of spaghetti code that is undocumented, and often difficult to read.

Think of it as the Winchester Mystery House of source code.

All too often, problems often arise requiring additional work just to locate the issue, not to mention having to test and find the impacts of any changes he might make.

From his experience, Richard has identified five main task types:

• Easy tasks – these are straightforward, can be done quickly, and will require minimal testing;
• Normal tasks – these can be done in a few days without much, if any, outside interaction;
• Hard tasks – these are tasks that will require a lot (or at least an unknown amount) of work and research;
• Escalated tasks – these are tasks that cause the client discomfort and need to move to the front of the queue; and
• Emergency tasks – these are tasks that displace the work already in process and become in-process.

For Richard who is working solo and off-site, parsing his tasks out like this is invaluable. Since his client has had little visibility into his workload, he’s begun using an online Personal Kanban tool to create a workflow that he can share with his client. Tasks are colored according to their type, allowing the client transparency into the mix of work he has.

Right now, the client has no way of knowing the grades of severity of tasks. Tasks that sound simple to the client can sometimes be difficult in the code. Similarly, tasks sound hard may actually be very straightforward. When the client is waiting for results, it’s important for them to know which tasks look easy or hard. This will directly inform the client’s risk assessment of setting Richard loose on a particular task. If he identifies one as hard, the client can then re-assess the priority of the task and the investment it might require.

With client access to Richard’s Personal Kanban, and task types clearly differentiated, clients can work alongside Richard to prioritize and schedule specific tasks. This will increase mutual understanding by giving them something visual and tangible to speak to when they have their regular meetings. Work can always be re-prioritized on-the-fly by mutual agreement. With transparency into Richard’s workflow, the client will be less inclined to feel behind schedule because level of difficulty is now understood.

Richard can now use all this information to help guide what items to pull when he’s moving from one task to the next. Escalated and Emergency tasks are self-evident and should be rare (if they aren’t rare, that points to other problems we’ll talk about in a later blog post). Beyond those, Richard’s risk assessment for pulling specific tasks is based on an amalgam of client priorities and available time.

If he looks into his backlog and, if he has only a few hours, he can pull out an Easy task. If he has a few days, he can pull a normal task, etc. His risk profile for pulling tasks is now informed by these task types.

And yes, this is all fine until some task goes wrong. Which of course will happen. This we’ll cover tomorrow in the post “When Tasks Don’t Go Right.”

Photo by Jeffc5000

Analysis -> Creation -> Refinement -> Launch

refinement is dependent on both analysis and creation.

That neatly takes care of dependencies, but in our Personal Kanban we really don’t want to have to come up with new value streams for every little project we are doing. So we need to come up with ways to visualize dependencies that will let us maintain a simple value stream.

So let’s look at a few ways we can do that. As always, these are suggestions and we’d love to see how other people work this out.

Task Notation

We can simply notate tasks with where they lie in a stream of pre-requisites. Noting what comes before can help us not prematurely pull a task, letting us know what comes next can help us raise that next task in priority ones it’s antecedent task is completed.

Scheduled Escalation

Sometimes tasks become relevant on or around a specific date. What we can do is place tasks that need escalation on a certain date on an actual calendar. When that date comes, take the task off the calendar and place it in backlog. If is has a due date, be sure to note that date on the sticky.

Sticky Stacks

Tasks that neatly follow one another can simply stack. When a task is pulled, its next task is seen in the backlog. Sticky stacks can also nicely visualize a project without taking up too much space.

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So that’s it. Some quick ways to deal with dependencies outside the value stream. Of course, do look in Design Patterns to see if you can find ways to deal more elegantly with specific projects.

Note: This video is best viewed full screen.

Productivity: having the power to produce

Efficiency: the ratio of the output to the input of any system

Effectiveness: being able to bring about a desired result

Personal Kanban is considered a Productivity tool, because it gives us the power to produce more.  It is likewise said to increase Efficiency by limiting WIP and increasing focus which means we expend less energy to affect results. This in turn boosts our Effectiveness by providing the information necessary to make better decisions and act on them.

Often people have bursts of productivity, efficiency, or effectiveness – but because they aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing, these events are sometimes dismissed as happy accidents. Personal Kanban makes your work explicit, meaning it constantly shows you what you are doing and what you could be doing. This helps you interpret your options and prioritize you tasks based on current conditions. Personal Kanban also lets us balance productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and turn them into three parts of the same machine.

Individually, bursts look like this:

• Bursts of productivity – You get a lot done, but is it the right stuff?
• Bursts of efficiency – Work is easily done, but is it focused for maximum effect?
• Bursts of effectiveness – The right work is done at the right time … this time. Is this process repeatable?

Heroes on Their Way to Work Don't Dress Like You and Me

I call these bursts “hero” events. Over time, things get screwed up and you have to call in a “hero” to fix them quickly. That hero may be you, a temp worker, a consultant, or a friend. But you identify a need so late in the game that you need to work above and beyond to complete the task at hand.

What’s funny is that after these hero events, we feel good. And because we feel good, we think, “That was awesome!” and we ascribe the event to something exceptional. Something that just couldn’t possibly happen every day.

During a recent project in Washington, D.C., I worked alongside members of the Intelligence Community. More than one of them told me that people in the IC  who allegedly had cushy desk jobs inside the Beltway, routinely volunteered for live fire assignments.

These people specifically volunteered to be in harm’s way.

Why? Because it was a period of sustained productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. People did not have the “luxury” to relentlessly and constantly prioritize. In the field there is no choice but to constantly re-evaluate conditions and re-prioritize actions. Because picking the most important task was the only way to survive, the only way to complete the mission.

There was a mission. There was survival. And those two conjoined drivers created a great deal of focus.

Hopefully we don’t have to risk our lives simply to focus on our work. Personal Kanban provides the structure to allow us to choose the right work for maximum effect repeatably.

For more on how to choose the “right” work, and then how to make sure your processes are repeatable see Prioritization and Retrospectives.

Photo by Randy Son of Robert.

Last week, Eva Schiffer of Net-Map wrote me and said:

I have just erased my to do list and transformed it in something kanban-like. My own to do list format, that always worked well for me, had 4 categories:

Important and urgent
Important, less urgent
Less important, urgent
Less important, less urgent.

That helps me a lot because I normally love the less important, less urgent tasks, and while they often lead to really interesting creative outcomes, it is important for me to keep procrastination at bay and make sure that I don’t just impress myself with the number of tasks performed, but also do those things that are most urgent and/or important.

This got me thinking about the relationship between productivity and effectiveness. Eva recognized that simply increasing her throughput was not enough, that was mere mindless productivity.

What Eva was searching for was effectiveness.

At Modus, we do dynamic prioritization using a priority filter that looks like this:

For Tonianne and myself, this works wonders. We constantly have a short list of items that need doing, and as they move from 3 to 2 to 1 they become more important. However, prioritization is a contextual exercise that varies from moment to moment. As we can see here, “Eat all the chicken on earth” is Priority 2, but that could suddenly change to Priority 1 if suddenly I were in a place where all the chicken on earth was accessible.

Eva, like many organized people, uses a matrix to ascribe values of urgency and importance, which results in something like this:

Major Tom's Backlog

In the case of Major Tom, he has been sent into space to find out what’s there. He’s a celebrity and everyone is watching him. There are a variety of things he could be doing up there, but he has a a backlog that varies between levels of urgency and importance.

So for example, the papers want to know whose shirts he wears. That’s important both to his individual fame and to the space program in general because after all, it’s being good to the press. But at the moment, he’s in space so he can get to that later.

Major Tom's Workflow

If the press scores an interview while he’s up there, though, it can become relevant and therefore is something to complete.

So we reach Major Tom here in the middle of his work day. He’s already managed to tell his wife he loves her very much, and he’s stepped outside the capsule. He’s put his previously active conversation with ground control on hold because at the moment, he’s working on other things. And he’s now floating in a most peculiar way (and noticing how different the stars look).

Major Tom is still limiting his WIP and he’s still visualizing, even if his backlog is drawn as a matrix rather than columns. The matrix is a familiar organizational tool for him, and it should be preserved. (Although he probably should have checked his instruments.)

So Eva’s concern is very real – we stand a real risk of becoming mindless production units, grinding tasks out at hyper-speed without assessing their value. The key with Personal Kanban is to assess the value of what you are doing – however it is that you define value.

We’re all individuals – quality, value and growth are different for us all.

Not only that but quality, value and growth are also contextual. Today, home repair might be very low on your list. After a tornado, however, it’s probably going to be pretty high. Did you put it there? No. Life did. Context shifted. For that reason, just-in-time dynamic re-prioritization is key for workload management.

So be like Eva. Find the way you define your work – visualize it, and thoughtfully examine how you can best be effective.

I Told You To Paint the Sears Tower!

Please don’t feel bad if you find you’ve lost control of your WIP.

The two rules of Personal Kanban:

1. Visualize Your Work
2. Limit WIP

With a little practice, #1 becomes easy…second nature, even.

Number 2 is, well, pretty much a bitch to master.

It is better stated as a goal.  On a good workday, when things are flowing, we can limit our WIP and feel quite good about that.

What gets in the way of being able to totally master our WIP is the expectations of others. When people expect things from us, even if we’ve conveniently de-prioritized them, they let us know: “Where’s that report?” “I thought you were coming over to visit today.” “When are you going to mail that book to me?”

The telephone, instant messaging, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, fax, and just plain old screaming give people ample ways to contribute to the existential overhead that you would just as soon get to later.

Often these demands for your attention are highly emotional. People you want to spend more time with but can’t. People whom you care about but drive you crazy. People who need legitimate but time-consuming things from you. People who need to work with you but have massively different working styles that will slow you down.

This creates a lot of stress.

There is little in life we can do about the actions or expectations of others. We talk about expectation management, and can do a fair job of it by being clear about what we can do and when, but people are going make demands of us whether we like it or not.

Personal Kanban reacts to this stress by allowing easy re-prioritization of tasks.  You don’t think cleaning the garage is all that important.  You wife has a very different opinion.  Her priorities matter, too.

This sometimes means that we will need to reprioritize tasks and from time to time these will be tasks already in WIP.

Is that good? No.

Is it tolerable? Not really.

But it is necessary. We simply won’t always have the luxury of completion.

Again, Personal Kanban is aimed at getting you to visual and understand work’s flow – total control is an illusion. Do not be afraid to let reality guide your Personal Kanban.