The short answer is, every week or so, try to have a short retrospective with your team or alone (if you are working by yourself). When you have the meeting, review what’s happened and archive as you do.

Some of the tasks in your DONE column will spark introspection, some won’t. (Hopefully you don’t have to ponder all your work).

As you discuss the tasks, you can move them into your ARCHIVE where you store completed tasks. Or, if you are so inclined, you can throw them away.

In the video, the ARCHIVE is part of the software. With a physical board you can have your archive be a file folder or a shoebox.

This is also handy if you need to do your timesheets every week and want to actually remember what you accomplished.

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.

Keep Track of Tasks that Hurt

Kanban is meant to be epiphany heavy, but process light. These approaches are meant to provide simple means to visualize how your work actually flows. Some tasks are going to be horrible. They are going to take longer than you expect, be harder to complete than anticipated, or even just really annoy you.

In life, you want to do things that make you happy and not do things that don’t. So why not start noticing what you don’t like to do or what takes you away from doing the things you like?

The MAN THAT WAS AWFUL approach is simple. When you finish a task and it was in anyway unpleasant – set it aside. Then, later, take a look at the tasks that were unpleasant and look for patterns. Were the people involved the same? Was it a resource issue? Do you just hate doing those kinds of things?

After you see the patterns you can make choices like:

• when to delegate
• when to refuse work
• what processes you might want to recreate
• if you want a new career
• to cry

Again, the point here is to make what you are doing explicit. Hopefully bad things will initially fall into some patterns that you can consider and reshape. Awful tasks should become less and less common as you can spot them coming and learn ways to deflect them.

Photo by _Boris

Personal Kanban

Marc Bless has a great post about his personal scrum board evolving into a personal kanban. His personal retrospectives showed him a need to limit WIP, so he created a special section for WIP, while not losing track of his tasks awaiting the actions of others.

Marc Says:

After a while I recognized the repeating problem of too many thing in progress.

After a short personal retrospective I decided to improve my focus on the “in progress” lane. It seemed obvious to limit the number of things to work on in parallel. I splitted the “in progress” lane in two parts:

a) an “on hold / wait” part for all the things that have been started but need external help

b) a “working on” part with focus on all the things in progress. This part now is a Kanban box with a limit of two tasks.

In kanban for software design, a “cumulative flow diagram” is used to track performance. A big part of the cumulative flow diagram is its ability to visualize how close you are to completion of a large project, and where bottlenecks or waste appears in the process. It’s a very powerful and descriptive tool.

Above is the cumulative flow diagram  for the Modus Cooperandi Personal Kanban.  The diagram illustrates how many tasks we have in a given part of our workflow. This is our workflow, so you don’t need to emulate it. The components are as follows:

Backlog: Items that have yet to make it into the workflow.

Priority 3: Items that are coming up in importance.

Priority 2: Items that are important.

Priority 1: Items that need to be done soon.

Working: Items in the process of being done.

The Pen: Items that are waiting for external input.

Complete: Items we’ve done today.

Archive: Items we’ve completed in the past.

On this particular day, we completed 96 things in the past, accomplished  2 that day, sequestered 3 in the pen, and so forth.  Of course, as time goes on, your archive is going to become bigger and bigger.  In a directed project with a finite number of tasks, this is a very important part of the diagram. For personal kanban however, where tasks will build up forever, it shows us how much we’ve done or are capable of doing.

Simply from a flow perspective though, we might want to eliminate that part of the diagram.

So here, with no archive, we can discern some interesting patterns.

First, we see where we complete some serious work. We also notice where we gain a lot more work.  So on days where there is a tremendous dip in the number of tasks, in the above chart (but no dip in the first), we know that we moved a tremendous amount to the archive.

We can also see where we build up backlog again.  So, essentially what we have here are two graphs that show us (1) we are completing work and the number of tasks completed is continuing a fairly uniform rise, and (2) we see the actual variations in our work and when we take work on.

Since the chart is a time slice taken daily at midnight, the parts of the kanban with a WIP limit should be uniform, and represented by fairly flat bands, with the only variation coming from “The Pen,” “working,” and “done.”  If we have work in the backlog, we should be maintaining a fairly even amount of work in the queue.  The diagram illustrates that we’ve been working to achieve this, and as we’ve worked more closely, the uniformity is starting to manifest itself.

What we want to avoid is having the backlog band grow at an alarming rate. We want work there to feed the queue, but if it gets too overwhelming, we then know we have to start saying no to tasks.

The time it takes to move a task from backlog to completion is called “lead time.”  The time it takes to complete a task when you start working on it is  called “cycle time.” “Work time” is how long tasks were on your board, and active.  “Wait time” is how long a task sits idle in a queue, while waiting to be moved.  In a personal kanban, you might move one or even dozens of tasks across your board in a single day, so for you these are the numbers to watch for variation.

If at some point you notice your lead time jumps to 20 days, it’s obvious that you have too much backlog. If your cycle time jumps, something is stopping you from starting work.  If your work time jumps, something is stopping you from completing work. If your wait time jumps, something might be stopping you from working at all.

So…how do you measure this?  At the end of each day, you can track the information in the cumulative flow diagram by counting the cards in each part of the work flow, and entering them into a spreadsheet.  For the “times” you can write start and end dates on the cards, and calculate from there.

Or you can use Agile Zen - which is where these images came from – and leave the tracking up to Nate.

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.

Small adjustments can make all the difference.

In both Agile and Lean management there are points called “retrospectives,” regular and ritualized moments where a team stops to reflect. Checking processes for only a few minutes lets you re-orient the course of your work. These retrospectives allow a team the opportunity not only to celebrate or bemoan accomplishments or setbacks, but likewise to serve as a constructive way to create and direct their course.  A retrospective shows us that things either went well or they didn’t, understanding that either way, there is always room for plotting the effectiveness of future work.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with many people who’ve begun to use personal kanban. During the course of this thread, many of them have shared how they’ve started to deploy Kanban as a collaborative tool, using it to plan, prioritize, and do work both at home and in their place of business. Now we have to go that last step – we have to think about what we’ve done.

Whether it’s on our own, with our families, or with a team, a retrospective is vital in being able to identify, elucidate, and enact positive change. Retrospectives can take place at whatever intervals you are comfortable with, and for whatever period of time. Again, I’m not writing a how-to manual here, these tools should help you or your group manage tasks in a way that works best for you.

We can – and will – discuss a range of options for what a retrospective might look like.  But just like a kanban can reside on a white board, a piece of paper, a computer screen, or even a kitchen appliance, a retrospective is what works at the time.  If you are just finishing a project in the garage or on day 4 of hurricane disaster relief, checking your processes for only a few minutes will let you improve what you’re doing

You don’t have to fly to Pluto to gain from small course corrections. You want to always be fine-tuning your workflow and your work management. In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about a variety of retrospective styles – some that are thought exercises and others with statistical rigor. Whatever you prefer, there should be one for you and your team.

Note: When Kanban is working really well, and you have an intimate understanding of your work, then you will achieve what Lean calls a “kaizen state,”  a culture of continuous improvement. At that point, you are constantly doing retrospectives simply because you are so aware of your actions, and a such, a separate retrospective may not be necessary.

NewHorizons2015 is NASA’s Pluto Mission – which requires both course corrections and a whole lot of delayed gratification.