HOW TO: Limit WIP #7: Understand Your Customers

In this series, we’ve been discussing the psychology of your work, the sized of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who / what might interrupt us.Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers. When we do something, even if it is simply relaxing, there is a potential beneficiary of that task.We do things. Those things we loosely call “work”. “Work” has a “work product”. “Work products” should have some value for somebody. That somebody is the customer.Customers can include:

• those paying money for the work (the traditional customer)

• our bosses (corporate hierarchy)

• colleagues, coworkers, partners (corporate culture)

• regulators or agents of an authority (bureaucracy)

• family (family)

• friends and neighbors (society)

• ourselves (ourselves)

And there are likely other customers and subdivisions of these customers.If you are doing things that have no value to anyone … why are you doing them?To limit our WIP, we need to make sure we are doing the right thing.But even if we know it's the right task, are we doing the thing right? To learn this, we must ask ourselves:

• What does our customer want?

• What is the highest value they can get from my work?

• Do I have time to give them that value?

• How much value can I get done in the time I have?

• Will that level of value be sufficient?

We often find ourselves saying “no” to that last question, but continuing to do the work anyway.When we know our work is going to be of insufficient quality, we tend to become aggravated. We feel annoyance at the task, at those who asked us to do the task, an ourselves for getting stuck in a situation like this. This annoyance increases the chance that our work product will be of low quality – making the work even more insufficient.If we didn’t want to do a good job, this would not be a problem.Since we do, there are five quick actions we should take when we understand we have a customer:

• Be clear about what they want – Yes, this sounds obvious, but how many times have you had to rework something because of a simple initial lack of understanding?

• Be clear about what is on your plate – No, sorry Miss Customer, you are not the only thing I am doing right now. I wish you were, but life doesn’t work like that. Here’s what I can realistically do.

• Get their feedback early and often – How soon can you show them an interim product? How quickly can you compare expected and actual progress? Earlier feedback = earlier delivery.

• Understand minimum and optimal deliverables – Minimum and optimum deliverables give you a range of success to shoot for. If you are always aiming for the high point, you will usually underdeliver.

• Work is a relationship – All work is a relationship between the person doing the work and the person receiving it. Communication (again as early as possible) helps both cement the relationship and ensure an appreciated delivery.

It's simple, if we don't know who it is for, we don't know what we are doing. If we don't know what we are doing, how can we limit our work-in-progress?

HOW TO: Limit WIP #6: Count The Bosses–Show the Work

It’s hard to limit your work-in-progress when your boss count exceeds your WIP limit.If you have a WIP Limit of 3 and 12 bosses, you may as well have one card permanently in your Personal Kanban that says, “Negotiate with Bosses”.That sounds funny, but it is true. Your bosses will always require explanations about why you are working on tasks that are unrelated to their work.Tonianne and I play a game with people regularly called “Count The Bosses.” The rules are simple…. you count your bosses.If you need more than a few fingers to count them, you know that part of your job is not only satisfying their demands, but also choosing which one to be attentive to at any given point-in-time.Your bosses are people who directly give you work. In a few days, we’ll have a post #7 which deals with understanding your customers. For today, however, we simply want a number … how many people are giving you work?Then ask these questions:

1. Do these people consult with each other before giving me work?

2. Do I feel guilty when I’m working for one when another has needs?

3. Am I punished for doing work for one boss over another?

4. Am I in the middle of their disputes?

5. Will they let me complete tasks before giving me another?

6. Do they allow me to complete my work in a way that works for me, rather than working in ways they think I should?

What we would like is have answers that give them the right to give us work, but give us the ability to complete that work in the best way we see fit.If your answers are not in this direction, it is useful to show on a Personal Kanban what is really happening. Then discuss this with them around the board. Do not just go talk to them, because neither of you will have anything physical to talk about. The goal here is to use the board as a mediator. We want the board to reveal how there is too much work-in-progress and that the work load itself is hampering your ability to complete things on time.Have your bosses watch this strangely silent YouTube Video. Let them know you, too, have an optimal WIP limit.

Limit Your WIP

HOW TO: Limit WIP #5–Throughput Analysis

When we think about limiting Work-in-process, we have to confront that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough, we have to know what we are limiting. We have to see what we are really completing.A very real danger for us as people is that we limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the most important task to pull next” without understanding the weights of types of tasks.We have tasks that might:

• make us money

• satisfy someone else’s needs

• teach us something

• provide us pleasure / opportunity to relax

• gain us political favor / help avoid political disfavor

• satisfy bureaucratic requirements

• etc.

Depending on the situation, we will pick one of these over another. However, very often Tonianne and I see people favoring office demands over personal growth, emergencies over kaizen, and politics over family. This behavior creates new personal emergencies. If you ignore your spouse and your kids long enough, that has repercussions – the best of which would be that they feel ignored, the worst can be much worse.Back at the office, the emergency we are tending to right now is at the cost of other work on other project that, after it languishes for a while will also become an emergency. And the cycle continues.The sad truth is that quite often we create our own emergencies and, therefore, our own spiral into an emergency-centered life. When we reach this point, we say, “How can I possibly limit my WIP? Everything is an emergency!”

Emergencies Create Throughput Issues Create More Emergencies

In this video, we see the impacts of a workplace emergency. New emergencies are spawned at home and at work. The point here is not to say, “Don’t have emergencies,” but to understand how they can create an emergency cascade. If the person in the video would have hired a handyman at home and found even one person at the office to help him, his dilemma could have been avoided.The key here is balance. The tickets at the end of the week were all focused on the Desper Project, rather than on all of his goals. The more balanced the tasks are at the end of the week, the more balanced goal attainment will be. The visual cue of only red tasks let us know that new emergencies were brewing.When you are setting up your Personal Kanban, ask yourself what your goals are and make sure the stickies are designed to give you feedback on what you are and what you are not completing.

Personal Kanban Wins the Shingo Prize

Shingo Emblem

Personal Kanban won a Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence this year. This is the highest honor in Lean and we share the award with some pretty august company.This award is humbling. Shingo awards are usually focused on manufacturing or applications of specific Lean principles with many direct nods to Toyota.Personal Kanban is strongly rooted in Lean ideals, but it much more focused (as the name implies) on the individual – on us as people.Tonianne and I are greatly energized by this award and look forward to seeing Personal Kanban continue to grow and thrive.Read about it on CBS News and the Lean Systems Society sites.

HOW TO: How to Limit WIP #4– How to Size Tasks (sort of)

Strangely, although people routinely overburden themselves with work, their first objection to limiting work-in-progress is “don’t all my tasks need to be the same size? How do I size my work?” They hear the possibility that we can get more work done in a system where we see our work and focus on completion, but they are doubtful that this is enough.So, after never paying attention to your work at all, now you want to be a superhuman estimator as well?

Simply changing how we think about work can help us manage work.

Ultimately, for me, I recommend not paying attention to task size at all at first. Wait until you actually see your work flow for a while.But, at some point, you will start to get a little more sophisticated and start to really wonder about task sizes.In this video, Stephen Covey plays a game where he coerces this apparent executive to place rocks in a tub. The goal is to put in the big rocks after all the little tasks have been achieved. The little tasks can be seen as interruptions, distractions, or the day-to-day minutia of working.The end-result is that it is, of course, easier to plan for the big rocks (by putting them in first) and there’s still plenty of capacity for the little rocks to fit into the nooks and crannies.I really love Stephen Covey and have gained mightily from his insights. However here, we can see a few flaws and they related precisely to our fears about task sizing and estimation.  (Go on, watch the video, then come back to this…)

Planning for the Big Rocks

Our issue here is that we are trying to size elements (little rocks) of larger concepts (big rocks) without fully understanding the larger concepts. How many of us focus on the task we are assigned, but don’t question the overall project?  How many of us get bogged down in a task and then notice the deadline looming and say, “I’ll make up for this delay later?” How many of us take on a two-hour project that we work on for two-days?In short, we can’t really distinguish big and little rocks.We end up focusing on the size of tasks and not the flow of tasks. We wonder what the cost of delay is, but we can’t measure it because there is no flow for the delay to impact.Covey is making the same mistake most people make, he thinks those things are ROCKS.

This implies that they have definite shape, weight, and color. Corporate planning is not a solid, it is a gas. It will fill the space you provide. If you give Covey’s rocks no definition, they will swell up and overflow your big plastic tub. (Am I really posting about gaseous rocks?)This tortured analogy is necessary only because we all simultaneously conceive of projects as definite and without form. We recognize the number of unknowns. We make plans and they scare us. The more scared we are, the more we try to tightly control our projects. This is like bearhugging a water balloon. At some point we control too much (hug too tightly) and it explodes all over us. Then we get frustrated and blame the balloon. (more analogies!)

Better the Bucket

Projects are actually the bucket. Tasks are the rocks. Most tasks, as Covey shows, are pebbles. They flow through our day as easily, and as awkwardly, as they did when she poured them in at the end. Most flew right on in, but every so often she had to stop and shake the bucket.That made everyone laugh, and it made her and Covey grin conspiratorial little grins.Why? Because it was awkward.And so is our work.In the end, the size of any of those tasks didn’t matter a bit. What did matter is she devised a system that noted that there were observable differences in her task types. She put one task type in first, in a deliberate way, and then allowed the other task type to flow.  In this case it was physical size.In other cases it could be something else.

Context Has a Size

Tasks all have context that relate to our concept of their size. If I told you, your task was to walk into the next room and get something I just printed out of the printer, you’d estimate the size of that task to be small. If the next room involved crossing a pool filled with crocodiles, you might be surprised when it took you longer.The politics, emotional weight, and implementation details of the seemingly smallest task can prove to be gigantic. We simply won’t know until we understand the system. When she understood Covey’s system, she changed her approach to work.Size might matter.