Communication: Why Limit WIP IX

Team B

“Good morning, Eldred.”“Good morning, Markus.”Before Markus came on board, there was zero contact with the CEO. Maybe at the Christmas party. He was more like a movie star – someone you recognized but didn’t dare approach. Certainly not someone who would know your name.Markus, on the other hand, was a regular at stand-up meetings. He’d participate, but not dictate. It was like he was actually interested.For months now, Team B had been regularly releasing features for the product. Now, the team was suspiciously close to … delivering.Markus comes into Team B’s space and looks up at the kanban. He sees directly what’s in process, what’s done, and what is almost done.He says to Eldred, “That looks good!”There was no briefing. There was no status meeting. He can see that work is flowing. That two tasks are completed and three more are in acceptance testing. Soon they’ll be ready as well. No tickets are marked as blocked or as a problem.The team is within their WIP limits – 2 for design, 2 for development, 4 for acceptance.Eldred says with a smile, “If the box design is out of development today, the rest is easy. We have a working session on that today. I think we’ll knock it out.”After years of shoddy or no releases, they are releasing something after a matter of months – and that feels good.

Communication and Limiting WIP

The WIP limits for the team enable flow of work, they also limit the work being undertaken to a reasonable level. On Team B’s board, Marcus is able to quickly grasp what is going on – so can the members of Team B, so can members of Team A. Everyone can see the simple story that is this project.That instant information transfer from kanban means that no one on the team had to tell Markus their status. Since nothing is blocked or shows a status of pain, there is no need to talk about them in depth. Eldred mentioned one feature in particular, because it was relevant and he was excited about it.Time consuming communication can now be reserved for things people actually need to talk about.In addition, the board is always on. If something becomes blocked or in danger, the board communicates that too.Without limited WIP, the board’s conversation becomes much less compelling. We never know if people are overburdened. We will likely have an incomprehensible number of tickets on the board. Tickets will enter the board and languish for long periods of time. When questioned, people will say, “Yeah, I’m just not working on that right now” and will continue to say that as the board fills with the trivial and the catastrophic.The healthy constraint of limiting WIP creates a coherent message that is instantly communicated to all. This is post 9 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP.   Read post 10 Learning: Why Limit Your WIP X in the Why Limit Your WIP series.  Also, see the index for a list of all of them.

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.

11:26 AM

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.