Catching Up With Jim Benson on Personal Kanban
In this Projects At Work interview I got a chance to ask Jim some questions about putting items on the board just so you have a record of them and can move them over. At what point does that become a wasteful step. As always, Jim’s feedback led me to thinking about my practice of PK in a completely different way than I had in the past. You can find the interview here:
Part 1(Listed as Part 3 on the ProjectsAtWork site) I still find that one of the most interesting aspects of using Personal Kanban (which I have not found with other productivity practices) is that there is the doing of thing and the learning about how you are doing things. The insight provided by the latter continues to prove to be the more valuable part of working this way. For me, putting everything on to the board does mean that I am putting up stuff just to move it over. This does create some waste. But it also helps me become more aware of the fact that I am overloading every day/week all the time and still trying to plan more in than could be done. Yes, I need more discipline in how I work. (Who doesn’t?) But the discipline is not needed as much in how I work, as it is in what work I assign myself in the first place. Reducing or limiting what I put in my backlog should make it easier to get more done, but only if I can maintain the discipline to actually stick to my board and not keep including items that are not up there and taking them as items to work on.
… and I guess admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. ;) * The interviews are listed on the Projects at Work site as Part 3 and Part 4 If you'd like to learn more about Personal Kanban, you can find the book here. You can find Jim on Twitter here.
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Personal Kanban - Lessons Learned
It’s been seven months since I began using Personal Kanban. Initially I wanted to learn more about Kanban and also come up with a better way to cope with the massive amount of things I had waiting for me to do. I’ve definitely learned more about Kanban and my ability to manage the work I have to do in a much healthier way than I had before. Most of all, there were learnings that caught me by surprise.
And now, seven months down the road, I am on the road to recreating the same mess in KanbanPad that I used to have in Things. Right now I have:
The biggest benefit of the last few months by far, is that I have become more aware of how I work and I am more aware of what I need to do to correct it.
When you begin studying certain forms of meditation you learn to count your breath. When thoughts arise you are to observe them, but not engage them. You just let them move on without getting caught up with them. If you do find that you are caught up, once you realize it, you let go and then refocus on your breath and start counting again. Not easy in the beginning, but the more you do it, the less difficult it becomes. My expectation is that working with Personal Kanban (or whatever approach is taken to getting work done) is similar. There are have periods where things go well and, and some, not so much. The trick is just to go back to the starting point and do it all again. Time to make the donuts… |
Personal Kanban Interview with Marcello Scacchetti from Jellybend.com
While Marcello's approach towards Personal Kanban is a little different than my own, we have had similar learning experiences while using it. For Marcello, he says during the interview that Personal Kanban saved his life. During the interview Marcello also talks about his use of Value Stream Mapping and how it has helped him with prioritizing the things he does (both inside and outside work). He also explains how he codes everything he does once it has been completed based on how much joy it brought him. (This is where I got the idea to do this with my own work - see the post here.) These are two of the factors that contribute to Marcello's practice of spending 80% of his time doing things that bring him as much joy as a kid feeding ducks. I hope you will enjoy the interview. I got a number of ideas from Marcello that I applied to my Personal Kanban testing after we spoke. If you'd like to learn more about Marcello, you can find him on twitter at @marcellonextrem on the Jellybend.com website. |
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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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
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. |