THRIVE
The official blog of Personal Kanban
Prioritization is something we all feel we could use more of.
But in the end, prioritization is an acknowledgement that we lack clarity in our work and expectations.
This PK Powerup provides four quick ways to better prioritize your work.
Note: We also have two, very deep courses on prioritization on Modus Institute.
Modus Institute videos about dealing with Covid are free.
Hey everyone, this blog post is going to be more like a personal letter. We don’t need to be lectured to right now, but conversation is crucial.
I’ve written a few posts about Covid and the global shutdown on What’s Your Modus?, but right now I thought I’d send this letter and make a quick video.
Let me start with this.
It’s okay to be on edge.
You don’t get much more uncertainty than where we are at right now. We are restricted in movement and action for an indefinite period of time. Lack of certainty is threatening.
You, your family members, your co-workers are all going through this in their own way.
Give them, and yourself, a little latitude for moodiness, lack of motivation, and confusion about what the right actions are right now.
In this post, I just want to talk about two things: certainty and triggers. They are some basic building blocks in successful work and right now they are in short supply.
Certainty
One thing that gives us certainty is … structure. Even if the structure we have changes, understanding the rules of “right now” are important.
I grew up in Nebraska and experienced more than a few tornadoes. Sometimes they were cavalier nuisances, but other times they were devastating.
During a tornado warning, there is fear and uncertainty. You don’t know what the storm will do, exactly. You don’t know where the tornado is, if it has touched down, what is in its path. You just know your expected actions. Crack windows to normalize pressure, get to lowest point in the house, get you’re your most reinforced room, get away from windows, and wait while listening to the radio.
Not the most fun structure, but certainly a lot better than running around screaming “What do I do? What do I do?”
You and your team need to sit down, talk about what work still needs to be done, what you do and don’t know about work, what you can and cannot learn quickly, and how you can all keep each other involved and informed as you each work and learn more.
You need to build your working structure, even though there is more uncertainty now than ever before.
Triggers
At Modus right now, we are all uncertain about what’s going to happen next. We are used to traveling and having travel equal income and stability. It was kind of a strange reassurance. If I’m in an airport things must be okay. That’s a trigger. A reassurance that things are proceeding.
When I’m on site with a client, there are always things to observe and conversations to have. When I see people overloaded without understanding the work of their peers, we generally talk about that and find ways to visualize that overload that results from lack of understanding and devise fixes. The overload, that kind of observation, is a trigger for action.
We all have those triggers and many others. When we are remote, those triggers are likely to be absent. We need to find some new ones. Triggers are the mechanisms we use to know when the status quo is working and when we need to react to change.
Without these triggers, we don’t know what to do next and become demoralized.
The trigger of a reassuring trip to the office or the classroom or the jobsite has been replaced with sitting in a room usually reserved for relaxation. The space isn’t designed for work, isn’t ergonomic, and is filled with non-work people. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance that goes along with that.
Your Next Acts
Please, now more than ever, take care of each other. Focus on the people and their ability to work…the work will proceed apace, but only if your professionals are cared for and respected.
Get your team together in a video call.
Make sure the tech works (Do it once in a dedicated meeting).
Using something like Miro or Stormboard, brainstorm on what your team needs to establish their “right environment”. What does everyone need, right now, to work comfortably?
Focus on how people are feeling, the work hasn’t changed much, but the people have. This is people time.
Visualize the work, of course.
Limit the WIP more than usual. One thing per person or one thing collaboratively for every two people… do very little at first and just finish a few things so you can build and quickly refine a system.
Have huddles every day.
Talk as much as possible.
Don’t let anyone flap.
There are other recommendations on What’s Your Modus and certainly more in the classes on Modus Institute (70% off for this Covid situation).
Stay healthy, stay safe, take care of each other,
Jim
A construction team planning work openly and honestly.
When we look at a Personal Kanban, its simplicity belies its power. Visualizing our work as individuals and as teams and even as teams of teams creates trust, reliability, and understanding. When we want to co-ordinate work, these are serious prerequisites.
The image above is from a construction trailer, they are engaged in a Lean Construction exercise known as a "pull-plan". Each color is a different contractor, each diamond is a delivery or a milestone. In this case we have five different contractors whose daily work relies on the completion of daily work done by the other contractors.To spell this out, their work directly relies on people in other companies--every day.Historically, this had led to predictable delays with different companies working at different speeds for different reasons. You might recognize this from different departments in your company or different people in your family.
Our work often relies on other people who are often simply ignorant to our needs.Not surprisingly, when they are ignorant of our needs they don't give us what we need.
This makes it seem like they are "out to get us" because so often the work we receive is lacking. We attribute malice where the fact is those other busy people have different things to worry about every day and need to see their work in your context and vice-versa.The pull-plan concept takes this head-on by looking at the backlog of work (your options column) for the next six weeks and sees who needs to do what, when, and in what way in order for the schedule and budget to be met in a safe and quality way.
The teams meet and on each ticket list each activity (option) they need to do to get their work done, the number of days the work requires, and then the trigger that makes that work happen (sometimes this is from another contractor, sometimes this is just their work progressing).
This allows each contractor to self-report how long they would like the work to take and then compare the total production time to the schedule and figure out what can be done the meet the customer's expectations. Often, very often in fact, this is simply having the contractors discuss with how they need the space prepared for a clean hand-off.
I've noticed almost all in-office conflicts and "culture problems" end up coming back to hand-offs, which basically means they come back to an understanding of what quality work really entails. We need to ask some serious questions: Do I know how to provide you with work? Do you know how to provide product to me? Are we talking to each other or past each other? Do we really understand how our individual work leads to a quality end-product?
Very simply, the image above has professionals come together, make visual what they need and when they need it, and then find the best path to mutual success. They learn quickly the challenges the other contractors have and get to inform them of their own. This makes many of those challenges lessen or outright disappear.
Consider, in your Personal Kanban or that of your team, that there might be opportunities for these kinds of conversations. Be open, be honest, and work things out.Remember: No one creates a quality product alone.
Daily tasks confound people. How do I put them in my Personal Kanban? How do I visualize work that I do every day? Many people actually make new tickets each morning and move them into Done during the day, adding to the monotony-not learning from it.Someone on Quora recently asked how to deal with 'Dailies'. Here is my response:There are a variety of ways to do this in Kanban apps, even ones like Trello with few features.The design of your system will of course depend on several factors like:
Are your every day tasks all or mostly all of your work?
Are you the only one who does these every day tasks or are they shared?
Are the every day tasks ones you learn from or are they … mindless?
Are the every day tasks fully repeated or do they change with context?
Do the every day tasks involve customers?
To answer the question for how I personally do it,I travel a lot, so I do use Trello.I have three inbound columns that track the High, Medium, and Low priorities of tasks I need done. (A priority filter).To the right of that, I have a column called “Dailies”. That has several tasks that require regular attention. Each day I’ll have one or two pomodoros that focus specifically on those tasks.Nothing special there.The trick is…turn your daily grind into something actually helpful.On the other side, kill your “Done” column and create two new ones.“Task Complete” and “Learning”.Especially from your Dailies, you should have some learning. How long it took, what the response was from the customer, ways to do it better, information it kicked back at you, etc.If you don’t learn from your dailies and they aren’t the reason you are there…delegate them.If you do learn from them, do it explicitly.When “Done” with a daily task, the marking of “Done” isn’t mindlessly moving a ticket to the right. It’s actually noting in the learning column what you learned that day, data you gathered, etc.General pro tip: If your work becomes mundane so do you. Make your dailies a growing experience.
I love to cook. When I make good food and share it with others, they will take a bite and look as excited to eat it as I was to create it. They might not understand the subtleties that went into it, but they understand the product. Satisfied eater, satisfied chef. When we do something and are happy with it, we get excited. We want to show it to others. We are proud of what we’ve done and want to see the world interact with it.In the world of Personal Kanban, we teach that we want people to use their boards to see what is happening and continuously improve. This doesn’t only mean that you look for everything bad and make it go away, you also look at what’s gone right and make sure you do more of that. Marcus Buckingham, years ago, urged us to build on our strengths, but right now team retrospectives and annual reviews focus on the negative. “Improve” becomes synonymous with “how can you stop doing bad things.”That’s not improvement, it’s rehabilitation.It is popular now to look at “plus / deltas” after meetings or when something happens. After witnessing about a million plus/delta exercises, it is clear that the only thing that’s improved are the deltas. More often, however, there is no improvement at all. People go through the exercise and fill in the columns, then they leave.That’s not improvement, it’s filling in plus/deltas.While you are using your Personal Kanban, either by yourself or with your team, look at improvement opportunities like this… What can be improved?Pro tip: Improvement does not mean “fix”.Look for things that go well that you can improve to be the norm. Look for things that don’t go well that can be improved to bolster things already going well. Look for things you can stop doing.When you find them, that’s not the end of the mission. This isn’t merely discovery.Now you need to actually do things to improve. That means making a plan for the improvement, figuring out what needs to be done, making the tickets for your personal kanban, and then doing them. Doing them, in turn, means you have to Do Them. Make time for them, make the improvements collaborative (we’re more like to elevate an improvement task if we are working with others), and set a goal date for the improvement. Then measure and discuss the impacts of the work you’ve just done. Make the improvement a system to both complete and learn.Sound like work? Maybe it is. But in the end, you get to do more of the work that is rewarding, work will be easier, and you’ll spend a lot less time complaining. It’s an investment.
