In 2006, my first kanban based project involved setting up a Personal Kanban for a team of 12 developers. Since we were just starting out with kanban, we had no idea what to expect. I did know a few key things though.1. I wanted the customer to have real-time information about what was going on2. I wanted no more status meetings3. I wanted no impedance whatsoever between my development team and the customerSo, we did the following:We set up a kanban in Groove 2.0 (a collaborative platform developed by Ray Ozzie) and shared that with our client. This meant that our client could see our kanban any time they wanted.I gave my client full access to all my developers. In other words, anyone from their side could contact anyone from my side any time they wanted. They were on our chat rooms, they had our Skype addresses, they had our phone numbers. Any time the client wanted access to anyone or anything at Gray Hill Solutions, they could have it.I allowed the clients to come to our daily stand-up meetings and fully participate. They directly participated in the selection of work, the phasing, and its constitution.The upshot of this was that the customer has, through the kanban, a real-time warning system that we may be doing something that required discussion. The fear - of both my developers and the client - was that this would create endless discussions and nothing would get done.The opposite happened.The client understood where we were and what we were doing. They could look at the product any time they wanted. They could see the kanban. They attended the 15 minute meetings so they knew of any challenges we were facing.Additional conversations were rarely necessary - because everyone already knew.The kanban itself gave the client and the team such a high fidelity of information, all we ever needed to talk about was real changes in the backlog or design decisions. In other words, all we had to talk about was value.
Cards are Conversations
The whole point of having a visual control is to extract information from it quickly. In this respect, the personal kanban is much like a geographic map.Geographic maps convey more than merely the physical environment, they show us things like political, historic, organizational characteristics - both real and imagined spatial constraints - which give locations their context. Similarly, the personal kanban is a map of your work. It captures not just the tasks - but the logic, the flow that gives it an actionable framework
This is known as a pattern language.
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A language that helps us describe complex concepts simplisticly, by understanding their contexts.
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As we use the kanban to learn the pattern language of work, we have more kaizen events, more epiphanies, because we are finally understanding its true context. We learn what value really is, what our capabilities really are.
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threats disappear
This is known as a "pattern language," a language that helps us describe complex concepts simplistically, by understanding their contexts. As we use the personal kanban to discern the pattern language of our work, we encounter more kaizen events - more epiphanies - because we are finally understanding its true context. We learn what value really is, and what our capabilities really are. Soon, threats disappear.
Modus Cooperandi Personal Kanban
I have intentionally made this personal kanban screenshot illegible because the text does not matter. What matters are the visual cues - the colors, the assignments, and the states.In this kanban, we have three staging columns: a working column, "The Pen" (to hold tasks in a state of workus interruptus), and "Complete."Immediately we see that today our WIP is filled with teal tasks. Those happen to be for the creation of Gov 2.0 University, one of our projects. We’re getting ready to launch the web site and conduct some media events, so this particular day was spent focusing on those tasks.We also see that yellow tasks (biz dev with a specific channel partner) make up most of the work in a waiting state. So now we understand that on our plates for this day, we have a lot of focus on G2U, but that biz dev might rear its head as an activity from The Pen becomes active.So while those yellow tasks might interrupt us, the kanban has mentally prepared us for them.Those yellow tags likewise tell us a story over time. We know their history. Did they appear yesterday or did the come up over time? Are those tasks ones that recur and just never go away?Do we have a deluge of project tasks (e.g. teal) that need to be batched and processed as a day with a single focus? Perhaps we have a deluge of different projects, but all similar task types (e.g. phone calls) that can be batched.What personal kanban reminds us is to look beyond the tasks to the patterns that arise on the board. Work now has a shape. You can begin to think of it in other ways.You can situate it in its context. Work has a geography.With personal kanban you can now see the entire river – where it emanates from, where it reaches, and how it flows – rather than dismiss it simply as a body of water.In an upcoming post, the pattern language of work will be explored.