Personal Kanban - On the Personal Kanban Couch with Scott and Ray
Categories:
5S,
Agile,
Brian Bozzuto,
kanban,
Kanban Pad,
kanbanfor1,
lacey,
personal kanban,
personal productivity,
personal project management,
productivity,
Ray Lewallen,
Scott Bellware,
Scrum,
value,
waste
Categories: 5S, Agile, Brian Bozzuto, kanban, Kanban Pad, kanbanfor1, lacey, personal kanban, personal productivity, personal project management, productivity, Ray Lewallen, Scott Bellware, Scrum, value, waste
| From time to time, we all get stuck.
And I am equally fortunate to know Scott Bellware and Ray Lewallen. I reached out to Scott and Ray with the intent of getting their take on what was happening with my Personal Kanban experiment. I also wanted to get their thoughts on my questions about interpreting value and see how they felt about my complete inability to employ 5S in my workspace. Both Scott and Ray agreed to allow me to record the call so that I could use it as a podcast of sorts. This is not a typical interview, but more of a conversation/debate. It is broken into two parts in order to make it easier to download and I’ve listed key points in the conversation below, along with the times during the recording when they occur. Part 1: http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/podCasts/279394.cfm 1:46 - Is Personal Kanban even useful to begin with? 4:20 - Why Scott doesn't use Kanban anymore 5:30 – The spread of Kanban 6:50 - Ray advocates for useful tools over following a specific methodology 8:30 – How Value and Prioritization build momentum 10:47 - Why momentum is so important 12:30 - Measuring value 12:45 - Writing everything down: wasteful, or not? 16:30 - Why Scott and Ray think I should throw everything away 18:30 - Making mindful decisions about your Personal Kanban practices
Part 2: http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/podCasts/279395.cfm 0:00 - The importance of WIP and the cognitive burden of the backlog 2:25 - Avoiding "rank, negligent ignorance" when tracking your work 3:17 – The resurgence of things that are important enough to survive 3:48 – Maintenance of information inventory 6:07 – The importance of customizing your own solution 8:00 - Dealing with interrupters 11:40 – Knowing which waste to eliminate 14:20 - You can't have kaizen, you have to be kaizen 15:20 - The value of 5S 18:10 - The importance of a soluble workspace 22:00 – Tracking recurring tasks 23:51 - practice mode vs. practical mode 25:00 - Where to learn more about Scott and Ray 26:22 - Scott's last request
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In the middle of this project I got stuck with Personal Kanban and was not sure how to move forward. I am very fortunate to know people like 
These guys are usually my first call when I get stuck with things that are related to Agile. They are both very smart, and they both have a lot of experience. But the main thing for me is that they both see the world, and the work, in a way that is completely different from how I see it. More often than not, our conversations end up with me gaining a perspective I would probably not have found on my own.
Personal Kanban - App Review Update: LeanKit and Kanban Pad
Categories:
kanban,
Kanban Pad,
LeanKit,
personal kanban,
personal productivity,
personal project management,
productivity,
WIP
Categories: kanban, Kanban Pad, LeanKit, personal kanban, personal productivity, personal project management, productivity, WIP
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I mentioned before that I was happy enough with LeanKit that after I had adapted to using it, that I was not going to keep testing out different apps for Personal Kanban. What can I say...
I was pretty happy with LeanKit from a Personal Kanban standpoint. When I checked it against my original criteria a few weeks ago, it only hit 50% of my original requirements:
But that was better than none, and it let me do some stuff I felt was really important:
I am also part of a volunteer group that had made a decision to use it and we were able to get full access to the tool which opened up some additional functionality. Being able to attach files to card and assign them to multiple individuals is something I found very helpful when using it with a team. And then.....
I went to a meeting. I sat next to someone way smarter to me. I glanced at his screen and saw that he was using a Kanban app. Since he is smarter than me, and had come to a meeting with just an iPad (an obvious indicator of superior intellect and travel skill), and his screen was filled with a lot of really bright colors, it became obvious to me that this was an app worthy of further investigation. And this is how I was introduced to Kanban Pad.
When I compare this Kanban Pad against my original criteria:
Another great feature is that the Product Backlog and Backlog of work that has moved past Accepted (meaning it no longer needs to be seen), can be maintained off the main task board. Kanban Pad also allows you to establish WIP limits for your queues and it warns you fairly incessantly about your flagrant violation of them should you choose to venture off the path. (I ended up not using this feature because my frustration over the warnings became more significant than my desire to maintain WIP limits.
There are a number of additional features that Kanban Pad offers, but those are the ones that have proven to be most valuable to me from a Personal Kanban perspective. By way of a final verdict/opinion on the app, I offer this... I've been using Kanban Pad for about 6-8 weeks now. It has become my primary tool for managing my work using Personal Kanban. After all my efforts at trying to find a way to use Things as a tool for Personal Kanban, I've all but stopped using Things and only open it (or Reminders) now when I have to capture something that I will add to my task board later. |
The app works great on an iPad or in a web browser. It's easy to drag cards from one column to another. And technically, Kanban Pad works on an iPhone as well. They do have a version sized for the small screen. Unfortunately, in the smaller screen, you can only view one column at a time. Trying to move tasks between columns in this format left me feeling like I was wearing boxing gloves while carrying a small child, a folding chair and trying to eat an ice cream cone at the same time.
Kanban Pad does allow for customizable, swim lanes, but not in exactly the same way that you'd set them up on a physical board. It allows you to establish multiple columns and within each column the Type setting allows you to establish Queue, In Progress or Queue and In Progress workflows. By using Queue and In Progress and editing the labels, I found an easy solution to my recurring task issue.
The app includes a feature where you can customize colored tags which can be applied to each task so that you can tell what type of work you are looking at.
