Kidzban Around the Web #2

Around the web people are sharing their experiences with Kidzban.  This is the second post in the series – Kidzban Around the Web.Joseph Flahiff introduced Kanban to his daughters on a Saturday morning when they had guests arriving at 2pm, and they needed to get chores done before their guests arrived. Joseph states in his Saturday Chores with Kanban Part I  "Normally the girls choose all their chores before they start."  They were previously using a chores list set up in an excel program.  On this particular Saturday he decided on introducing a Kanban board.

KIdzban Saturday Chores

Take a look at this wonderful video below where Joseph interviews his daughters - JoHanna and Jillian. They discuss the few bumps in the road they encountered and how they tackled their challenges together and why they'd like to use the process again. Joseph's daughter JoHanna mentioned "There will still be some bumps but not the same ones because we've learned from our mistakes.""Working with a list we never really felt like we were working together.  We felt like competitors instead of teammates." - JoHannaThe next Saturday, Joseph's entire family got into the action even his 3 year old daughter Joy completed tasks on their Kanban.  The Saturday Chores with Kanban Part II highlights another wonderful video below where the girls discuss how they worked together and broke up the chores into smaller tasks so they weren't so overwhelming. Team work is personified when you hear how all three daughters managed the task of vacuuming the master bedroom together.When asked what her favorite part of using the Kanban was Jillian stated "The achievement of finishing a chore."You can read and view Joseph's Saturday Chores with Kanban Part I and Saturday Chores with Kanban Part II in their entirety by heading over to his WhiteWater Projects blog.Videos and photo credit: WhiteWater Projects Blog.This is the second post in the series - Kidzban Around the Web.  You can read the first post in the series here.

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.

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.

Variation Can Help: Lean Muppet Post 1

Okay, so there's nothing about this video that isn't cute. And that's fine. But what does it have to do with Lean?One of the most important lessons that Lean can teach us is how to appreciate variation and make the most of it.When Jim Henson and this little girl went on set, it was to create a product - an item of value. The task, as originally written, was to create a short video where Kermit and the little girl sang the English alphabet. A simple progression of 26 letters. So simple that variation was inconceivable and no other product was possible.But little girls do not have SixSigma Black Belts or PMI certification (thank heavens!).So the cameras roll and the little girl suddenly becomes a point source in variation, undermining the original scope of work and putting the project in danger. She keeps injecting "Cookie Monster" in the alphabet, as if he were a letter in the English Alphabet.Cookie Monster is not a letter in the English Alphabet.The little girl thinks this is very funny. Kermit does not, because Kermit is a project manager locked into one irreversible type of value.Jim Henson, operating Kermit, knows that he can use rewards and penalties to get the product he wants. He knows that the little girl is really excited to be there with Kermit and that taking Kermit away will get her to settle down and sing the alphabet. So Kermit storms off.But rather than saying "Kermit, come back, I will sing the alphabet!" this little girl finds the true value - the honest value - and says with a sincerity that anyone can admire:"I love you!"And, even in the video, you can actually feel the impact this had on Jim Henson. Another day at the office turned into a beautiful gift.All because of variation.The real beauty here is that even though this product was fundamentally broken -  fundamentally it did not achieve its initial goal - Jim and the people at Children's Television Workshop thought this lesson was worth sharing. They saw that through variation in their youngest of knowledge workers, there was innovation and inspiration.There was value in variation.