Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2013 Announced

Kaizen Camp

Kaizen Camp 5

Join us July 30-31 as Modus Cooperandi will be hosting its third annual Kaizen Camp: Seattle on the beautiful grounds of the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture. Join Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry as we host our third year of Personal Kanban, continuous improvement, and better work management in Seattle. This event is two days, with wonderful food, conversation, and learning in a beautiful setting.Early bird pricing is $99 for the two-day event and only 175 people can attend, so register NOW!Last year we sold out quickly. We look forward to seeing you there.Kaizen Camp™ is an unconference. It's two idea-dense days of conversations about learning, creating, and building value through Lean Principles, agile methodologies, systems thinking, problem-solving, the thought leadership of people like Deming, Ackoff, Kahneman, and Argyris, real-world stories, and the impacts of collaboration and respect in the workplace. Kanban, Personal Kanban, GTD, Agile, Six Sigma, 5s, Cynefin are all on the table...but so are the root of all these forms: Continuous Improvement or Kaizen.Join practitioners, thinkers, and luminaries from across healthcare, education, manufacturing, retail, human resources, publishing, software development, and personal productivity. We had a sold-out crowd last year, and we expect to sell-out again quickly. So be sure to register today.Kaizen Camp™ is brought to you by Modus Cooperandi and sponsored by:

• Rally Software

• Substantial

• LeanKit

• Agile Logic

• TLCLabs

HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #3–Reducing Interruptions

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Four hours ago, I walked up to a big pad of paper and started mind mapping all the types of interruptions we might face while trying to get our work done.

• While I was working, Tonianne, who was on Skype, wanted to do a microphone test.

• Then I received an e-mail for a meeting request from a client.

• While responding to that, I received a lunch request from a colleague.

• While responding to that, e-mail arrived from another client with documents needed for our meeting. So I accepted those Google docs and scanned them.

• While responding to that, my bladder told me that I should rush off for a bio break.

• After that, I rushed to the board and started writing furiously about things that might interrupt us.

• Then Tonianne wanted to discuss some work that was coming up.

• Then I had my meeting.

And now, 3.5 hours later, I am finally writing this blog post.My goal is to get this done by my call at 1 pm.How do we limit our work-in-progress in a world of constant interruptions?Interruptions are more common in knowledge work than work, it seems. They are little things, one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Happening here and there.

What is an Interruption?

The Free Dictionary defines Interruption as:

in·ter·rupt (nt-rpt)

v.in·ter·rupt·ed, in·ter·rupt·ing, in·ter·rupts

1. To break the continuity or uniformity of: Rain interrupted our baseball game.

2. To hinder or stop the action or discourse of (someone) by breaking in on: The baby interrupted me while I was on the phone.

3. To break in on an action or discourse.

All three of these are important to us at work. While we are working, we are achieving (hopefully) a state of flow. Both in the psychological and the mechanical sense of the word, we are actively focusing, working, and completing the task at hand.An interruption is anything that breaks that flow-state. <The phone just rang. On call for 2m13s.>When we break that flow state, just like that side comment about my own interruption broke up the flow of this post, we have several states we transition through:

1. Initial shock (Oh my god, I’m being Interrupted!)

2. Adjustment (Context switch into new context)

3. Existence (Live in new context)

4. Closure (Close off new context)

5. Return (Return to previous context)

Depending on the detail needed by the interruption, these states can take take minutes, tens of minutes, or more. Luckily for me, my interruption was minor and rather fun, so leaving the blog post and coming back was relatively easy.

Interruptions and You

Since most interruptions are small, routine, and often important, we tend not to notice them. When interruptions are annoying, we do notice them. Then, when we are late in finishing something, we will blame our lateness on the annoying interruption and conveniently forget all the other ones.The fact is that interruptions are part of knowledge work. We seldom do it alone, which means we have colleagues. Colleagues require information. Information requires communication. Communication requires attention.We are also social animals. So, if I come into your office and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about the Amalgamated Salamander contract,” you are likely going to say, “Okay,” and we’ll talk. Even if you say “No,” you are unlikely to simply say “No,” and ignore me from then on, because that’s rude. And if you are truly rude, you will not stop at “No,” you’ll tell me exactly why you don’t have time for me which is still an interruption.We cannot declare interruptions as waste, either. Knowledge work and personal work is fraught with rapid changes in context. Micropriorities that never existed on your project plan crop up every day. Like “Hey, Barb’s out sick, you still want to have that meeting?” Or “I just got this fax from the FDA and they are claiming that epoxy isn’t a food and we have to pull our Gluey-Chooies off the market.” Things like that.So, we need to understand what our interruptions really are, before we decide that we want to eliminate them.There are many systems out there to help you isolate yourself from interruptions, but completely closing yourself off from change – in an environment with high degrees of change – doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Understanding Interruptions

In order to know a thing, you must become a thing. So, you must first go out and interrupt as many people as you can.No … scratch that.In order to understand interruptions, a good place to start is to (surprise) visualize them. Here are some suggested ways in increasing levels of complexity.Write Them Down: That’s simple enough. Keep a pad of paper nearby and when you are interrupted by ANYTHING write it down. Even if you are interrupted by daydreaming about how awesome lunch is going to taste.Add Them to Your Kanban: Get a special shaped sticky notes, like maybe ones shaped like the human cochlea (or something) and add substantial interruptions to your board. This way you can track them and see them mixed with your other work.Record Severity:  Create a table on a sheet of paper. 8 rows for the hours of the day, and 12 boxes for five minute increments. Then color in the boxes during which you were interrupted from your primary task.Now that you’ve recorded them. Ask some key questions:

• Are these interruptions necessary?

• Did I provide or receive value while involved in this interruption?

• Does this interruption happen frequently?

• Can I schedule this interruption, making it a planned event?

• Did I have the time and mental capacity to help with this interruption?

Again, the goal is not to eradicate interruptions. The goal is to understand them and work with them. Some will be waste and you can remove them. Some will be part of your job and you must find elegant ways to work with them.

Limiting Work in Progress

After you understand the nature of your interruptions, you can build much more resilient strategies for limiting work-in-progress. We can limit unnecessary interruptions, understand when it is appropriate for us to sequester ourselves in a Pomodoro, and structure our work to allow us to stay as much within our WIP limits as possible.Photo: “Dorrie Interrupts Sissy Bathing” by Paul Schultz.

HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #2–Affinity Mapping

Lightroom-2

Does this look familiar?

This is a problem, because an disorderly and frightening READY column is, in and of itself, a form of work-in-progress. Even if you are limiting your WIP, looking at that huge string of demanding post-its weighs us down just looking at it.

When we limit our personal Work-in-progress, our ultimate goal is to provide a calm, stable, and flowing state of work. We want a system that allows us to focus on the task and hand and complete quality work.

Having a huge, daunting backlog undermines our quality and destroys our focus.

What we need to do is focus this work. We can start by gathering some of those tasks together into groups and taking a look at what they really are.

We can do this by doing a quick exercise called Affinity Mapping.

We take the bulk of the stickies that we have in our read column and we sort them into groups that feel right. These might be easy, medium, and hard. These might be project 1, project 2, project 3. There might be two categories or there might be ten.

Lightroom-3

In the end, however, you’ll have your pile of pain sorted into easy-to-digest groups.

Then, you can name your groups. In this case they are “Household Projects”, “Office Work”, and “End-of-Year Taxes”.

Now we have a little more clarity over what is in our backlog. The previously undifferentiated jumble is a bit more orderly. We can now pull work knowing a few new things:

1. What projects we are really working on

2. What we are completing (and what we are procrastinating on).

3. What work we need to schedule for and what work can simply flow

4. Which tickets are still scary

headings with backlog

Perhaps the most important thing is that the cognitive load of the original backlog was enormous. That added to our work-in-progress. The cognitive load of this new organized backlog (no matter how you feel about doing your taxes or cleaning) is much less. Your brain is spending less time and energy trying to make sense of what’s coming up.

HOW TO: Limit Your Work-in-Progress #1–Calm Down and Finish

We had a long series, which is soon to become a mini-book, on why you should limit your work-in-progress (WIP). In it we focused on the dangerous side effects of being overworked, of which there are many. Those articles show how an organization might begin to limit WIP, but not really the individual.

And, since this is the Personal Kanban site after all, we should probably talk about how we, as individuals, can limit our WIP.

For this first post, we’re going to start with the simplest answer. The sports shoe answer – just do it.

2010-12-21 11.09.08

The key to just doing anything is not doing everything else. David Allen promotes a “stop doing” list to compliment a “to do” list. In that vein, here we don’t want to prematurely end tasks you are working on an never revisit them, but we do want to postpone some tasks so that other can be completed. In the beginning, a large part of our READY column will be populated with tasks we know we already started, but are setting aside to focus on the few tasks in WIP.

Calm Down

The first thing to do here is to recognize that the work you are setting aside will get done. In fact, by setting it aside and waiting to complete the tasks in Doing, you will likely get it done sooner than if you didn’t defer it in the first place.  So, calm down, your current fears of delayed completion are due to how long its taken you to finish things in the past – in a non-WIP limited world.

Why was it so hard before?

We covered this in the Why Limit WIP Series:

• It’s hard to remember well in a chaotic environment

• Completion is fulfilling

• Multi-tasking Creates Overhead

• Context Switching destroys our ability to think

• There is no social cost for taking on work

• We have no healthy constraints to stop us from overworking

• We are fundamentally unaware of the impacts of our workload

When we limit our WIP, we are able to focus, complete faster (much faster), and likely have an end product of higher quality.

We’ve been told over the years that productivity is a good thing. However, true productivity means completing things of quality – not simply doing lots of things at the same time and completing very little.

It should be common sense that if we focus on one thing, we will complete it faster.

We need to lose our irrational fear of not being productive, and replace that with embracing being effective.

So calm down, take a look at the task at hand, focus on it, and finish.

A Note

This will work most of the time. However, there are some complexities. We want to know:

• What is the right thing to work on?

• What is standing in my way of completion?

• How large of tasks should I be taking on?

• I have so many people counting on me, how do I tell some of them to wait?

• I’m interrupted so many times a day, how can I focus?

We will cover these in upcoming posts.

The Pen: The Handoff Column

Modus Board with the Pen

In our work, we have tasks we need to do, tasks we are doing, and tasks we’ve completed. We know we have a WIP limit and that we shouldn’t exceed it. But tasks aren’t always as tidy as we’d like. We don’t just start tasks and work until they’re DONE. Tasks, very often, involve input from others over whom we have little or no control.

For this purpose, Tonianne and I use THE PEN. In the board to our right (our actual board), you can see that Toni started working on getting a contract amended and then had to send that off for review and comment. While it’s gone, we don’t want to take her away from her other tasks. So she’s moved it into The Pen where it will reside until the outside party has done their bit.

We are blessed on this day to only have one item in THE PEN. Ordinarily we have five or six. When they stack up, it’s a sign that we’ve let them linger too long and should follow up on the tickets. We will also, if need be, set a deadline or a reminder on tasks in THE PEN. Today, that’s not the case – she’s reasonably sure that she’ll get a reply sometime by the end of the week.  However, if tasks are going to sit in THE PEN for a long time or if there is a deadline we have to meet, we will certainly set a date to check on it.

We want to limit our WIP to lighten our cognitive load and let us focus. However, we will often find ourselves in a position where we have several things waiting action by others. It’s okay to sequester these tasks and move ahead with active work.