Personal Kanban » productivity

WIP: The Kidzban Book

Tonianne DeMaria Barry — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 02:33:49 +0000

My dad was magical.

When I was growing up, he turned everything into a game – studying, yard work, even combatting my fear of the Wicked Witch of the West. “Life should be fun!” he’d insist, invoking his own father’s optimism, a dictum in broken Italian dialect I struggle to remember but have long since forgotten. I can’t say if it was by way of nature or nurture, but there’s no doubt the DeMaria men believed in enjoying life. When situations that were decidedly unpleasant presented themselves, they simply viewed them as opportunities to get creative.

And creative they got.

Whether it was setting the seemingly interminable list of prepositions I had to learn by rote to the tune of Pop! Goes the Weasel (About, above, across, after, against, among, ar-rou-uuund! ), or sending me into the science class I struggled with carrying a Tupperware container filled with a freshly butchered calf’s brain (can I still distinguish between the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata? you betcha!), my father believed life was too short not to make even difficult tasks enjoyable.

And then came the bane of my existence: Mr. Pittman’s history class. I despised it, and the 10 pound textbook that I’m still convinced was written to combat chronic insomnia. All those foreign names to pronounce! All those dates to remember! Boooor-ring was my justification for coming perilously close to failing an exam. But my father assured me, “they’re just stories,” after which he proceeded to re-create tales from Greek mythology casting all my friends as characters. Thousands of “stories” and two history degrees later, I couldn’t agree with him more. Life – even the tedious parts – should be fun. With a little creativity in fact, they can be fun and educational.

That’s why I had to write this post. And why Kidzban is so important to me.

For the past year and a half, Jim and I have heard from countless people – some from as far away as South Africa and Japan – all excited to share inspiring accounts of how they use Personal Kanban (and a little creativity) to inspire their children. Among the most common uses for “Kidzban” (as we’ve affectionately come to call it) involves visualizing and tracking progress as it relates to household chores, family projects, homework and exam prep, extracurricular activities, religious pursuits, and even confidence building initiatives.

Lately however, another group of Kidzban practitioners is emerging. Increasingly we’re hearing from teachers and home educators who are using it with great success in and beyond the “traditional” classroom. In an attempt to maximize student performance – and make learning fun – they are utilizing Kidzban to establish course goals, visualize homeschool curriculum workflow, track progress (relative to the student’s personal best as well as to that of their peers), identify strengths and weakness, and implement and monitor solutions.

We look forward to sharing many of their stories with you in the upcoming publication from Modus Cooperandi Press Kidzban, the follow-up to our recently released Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life.

So why all the enthusiasm about some sticky notes on a whiteboard, you ask?

Personal Kanban creates a narrative of “work” comprehensible to people of all ages and learning styles. Work ceases to be a collection of unrelated tasks and instead becomes a series of events that impact each other and flow from one to the next. With just a glance, users see the things they do well, identify areas that cause them to struggle, and gauge the distance from their goal. In the context of Personal Kanban – or Kidzban, in this case – struggle is not construed of as a failure but rather, as an opportunity for improvement. As a visual radiator, Personal Kanban lets the user know their success simply requires an alternate path. When that happens, they can look for root causes and then going forward, they can adjust their actions to suit.

Personal Kanban transforms our “work” into a system. It takes even the most tedious tasks and turns them into a game that’s appropriate for all ages.

Consistent among the stories we’ve heard is how children become excited about taking on even the most unpopular or even boring tasks, like picking up their toys or writing the letter “G” until they perfect it or making sure Fido has enough kibble in his bowl.

Not only is this “game” a simple one, but it’s an evolutionary one, too. Because Personal Kanban reflects our ever-changing context, it creates a game with an ever changing board. It’s a game we can improve upon, so boredom is kept at bay.

Children “beating” their siblings (and even their parents) by completing the most chores becomes commonplace. Students “compete” not only with their classmates but with themselves, finishing their lessons quicker and with less error. In both cases we’ve discovered that upon task completion, kids often seek additional tasks, incentivized by the satisfaction they get from moving yet another sticky note into the “Done” column.

Games can assume myriad forms, from head-to-head battles, to problem solving, to role-play. Depending on the circumstance, kids can find themselves besting their brothers and sisters in individual performance, or they can team up – “swarm” on a problem to solve it quickly and effectively. Parents and educators alike are using visualization to build creative games aimed at specific outcomes and to reward specific behaviors.

In the end, the games themselves become an education.

Whether it entails chores or schoolwork, being able to visualize and focus on the task at hand as part of a system – with immediate and ultimate goals – allows kids to see their action’s trade-offs while learning the best way to exercise their options. They take responsibility for their action (as well as their inaction), and feel pride in a job well done, establishing their independence and buttressing their self-esteem.

Kidzban curtails arguments, energizes families, and leaves kids empowered.

As a visual radiator, the board offers reinforcement for their efforts. Every member of the family can see that they’ve been effective, that they contribute value. When one person gets hung up, they know where help is needed.

So tell us – how are YOU innovating with Kidzban? Are you interested in sharing your experiences or visualizations, or just want to hear more from other practitioners? Whether you’re a parent or educator or even a kid, we invite you to become part of the emerging Kidzban community of practice.

On Facebook:
“Like” the Personal Kanban page on Facebook to meet and engage with others interested in Kidzban.

On Twitter:
Whether you have questions, ideas, or experiences you want to share, be sure to add the hashtag #kidzban to your Tweet to ensure other members of the Kidzban community can join in on the conversation.

In the interim, be sure to check out some of our favorite Kidzban practitioners:

For an innovative approach to chores, see Janice’s One Kid’z Kanban Board
For ways to use Kidzban throughout the home, see Maritza’s Becoming and Agile Family
For incorporating Kidzban in the classroom, see Patty’s Not Out of Reach

And last but certainly not least…

Recently I had the extreme pleasure of stumbling upon the most delightful yet profoundly insightful videologs from two of Kidzban’s most perceptive practitioners: siblings Jillian and JoHanna – ages 8 and 11 respectively who, later with the help of 3 year old Joy – are Kidzban rockstars (and agilistas in the making). Don’t miss their dad Joseph’s Saturday Chores with Kanban series, part I and part II.

Saturday Chores with Kanban, Part I
Saturday Chores with Kanban, Part II

And it’s just a hunch, but judging by the fun these young ladies are having helping out with the housework, I’m fairly certain they feel their dad is magical, too.

Image by Sprezzatura.

Am I Productive, Efficient, or Effective?

Jim Benson — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:02:12 +0000

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.

Urgent and Important: Incorporating your existing tools into Personal Kanban

Jim Benson — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:00:34 +0000

We’ve devised Personal Kanban to adapt to any system you might currently use (unless of course your preferred system is utter chaos). The only two rules are visualize your work and limit work-in-progress (WIP). PK’s main goal is to get you to write things down and begin to watch how and what you complete.

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.

Boosting Productivity and Learning with Spikes

Jim Benson — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:18:03 +0000

Spikes For Rapid Learning

Is there something you don’t know?

Almost everyday it seems we are faced with having to learn something new. Some of those things are trivial and easy to accomplish, while others are important and a more than a little daunting to master.

There are some easy steps to make learning less overwhelming.

On the Lean Agile Machine blog, there have been two consecutive, thought-provoking posts on Personal Kanban and productivity. One describes how to set up a Personal Kanban for research and writing production. The second describes how to set up short bursts of research and quickly evaluate the results.

SPIKE

n. A short burst of work to create a sample version of something

In agile programming, savvy developers will quickly cobble together a prototype, something merely to demonstrate the idea is feasible. Spikes make sure that assumptions about selected technologies and implementation are sound.

In short, a spike is a burst of work that makes sure that further work is warranted.

Learning is a great way to do this because there will always be things we do not know. Every field of study has nuances and developments that even ardent devotees can’t keep up with. So, when we suddenly need to bone up on say, deck waterproofing methods, we really don’t want to have to become a master carpenter.

So, you do a Spike.

You set aside 15 to 25 minutes (perhaps with your Pomodoro timer) and blast through as much research as you can. You Google, you Wikipedia, you save some links, you find some review sites. At the end of your spike, you have one of three outcomes:

You have learned as much as you need;
You have a good idea where to get information and how much longer it will take; or
You have learned that asking an expert is a better idea.

Now learning is easy. The spike gives you a predictable amount of time to spend to get results that tame the learning beast.

(Please do read the two posts from Lean Agile Machine.)

Photo by Shavar Ross

Getting "Personal" with Your Kanban

Tonianne DeMaria Barry — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:37:32 +0000

So why call it “personal” if I can use it with my family, in the classroom, or with a team at the office?

In life and in business, we create value. For Personal Kanban, “personal” relates to personal value. Personal Kanban tracks and visualizes items of personal value – tasks, work, and goals.

Industrial-style kanban – as it was conceptualized by Taiichi Ohno and notably implemented at Toyota – tracks industrial objects of value (tasks) as they travel thru a production stream that is often predictable. These objects have primary value to the organization. This model, while flexible, still tracks relatively well-defined objects through a relatively well-defined value stream. Tracking a crank case over its assembly process is markedly different from tracking the workflow of your upcoming move or your daughter’s wedding.

In contrast, “Personal Kanban” tracks items of personal value as they travel thru a less predictable path. These objects are often smaller and more varied.

In Personal Kanban, even when tracking the tasks of a team, the object of value – and by extension the resultant epiphany about the nature of that work – is still connected primarily to the individual.

Small teams work better when using a group Personal Kanban because such epiphanies are not only shared, but they can likewise be distributed. A realization that something can be improved does not have to be limited to your individual work.

Photo by Tonianne