Is Your Project in Limbo?

Limbo is completion out of reach

What happens when we start a project and it is honestly overtaken by events?We start a project in good faith and then, because context changes, we have to set it aside. It’s work-in-progress, so what do we do? The project isn’t done, we will likely come back to it, but it could be weeks or even months before we touch it again.These projects Limbo projects - we are unclear when they will start again, we only know that we’ve started them and that they are no longer our priority.  We are moving the project from being active to being just another option that may or may not be exercised in the future.Some people who are, shall we say, really into their Personal Kanban will lose sleep over this. But one word of (hopefully) enlightenment - Personal Kanban is more about understanding our work than it is getting specific things done.So, we now understand that we have a project that is either in Limbo or getting close to Limbo.Ask a few key questions as soon as possible and with as many people involved with the project as possible:

1. Limbo Really? Is the project really in Limbo or are we simply being distracted by something else? (Make hard, but informed choices when interrupting a project).

2. Quick Payoff? Can the Limbo project be focused on and quickly completed? (Even if you greatly reduce the scope of the project, can you quickly realize some benefit from the work done thus far?)

3. Future Knowledge? If you are putting this on hold, what will you need to know in the future when you start up again? Write a note to your future self about the state of the work, why it is that way, and the location of any half-completed work.

4. How Could This Happen to Me? Be very critical of why this project was allowed to start, only to be abandoned. Abandoning a project is very expensive and very wasteful. Figure out why this happened and take steps to avoid it in the future. Limbos cost money.

Again, Limbos are going to happen. They happen to everyone. Since our contexts and priorities change, it would be foolish to expect that every project we start on will be completed. The goal here is to use the Personal Kanban to understand our work, recognize when a project is in Limbo, and to act responsibly.Seattle, WAPretty Awesome Image: http://ichigopaul23.deviantart.com/art/My-Limbo-Wallpaper-364369944

Kaizen Camp: Seattle 2012

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Following last year’s excellent “Seattle Lean Camp,” we are now nearing Kaizen Camp:  Seattle 2012. (We did have a name change, so as not to confuse us with another set of camps with the same name.)Kaizen Camp is July 24-25, again at the beautiful Center for Urban Horticulture. Yet again, we have award-winning food trucks catering the event (both with vegetarian options), so no boring food! Already the event is nearly half full, with attendees from software, government, health care, manufacturing, education, and more.The diversity of voices and ideas is unparalleled – which is exactly what we were aiming for. Lean ideals and principles will be discussed. People sharing their success stories as well as their challenges. Different disciplines working together to create new ideas and explore continuous improvement.Last year we were blessed with great conversation, learning, food, and near gender parity. Judging by the buzz so far, this year promises to be even better.What to expect:

1. Great sessions

2. Conversations with other smart people

3. Learning about what is working

4. Strategizing about sticky problems

5. Exploring ways to create better working environments, systems, processes, and policies

What you will be spared:

1. Dull speakers

2. Bad boxed lunches

3. Canned presentations

4. Being silent while others talk at you

5. Sales pitches from consultants pretending to be speakers

Cost and SponsorsKaizen Camp: Seattle is $79 early bird and $99 late bird. With all this learning, two awesome meals, a full day of snacks, and a T-shirt from Nordstrom, that’s a steal. We couldn’t do this without our sponsors:

• Nordstrom Innovation Labs

• Modus Cooperandi

• University of Washington

• University of Washington – Bothell

• LeanKit Kanban

See you there!

One Day’s Idea is Another Day’s Waste

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On my travels through startups and the corporate world I see small to gross acts of negligence. They usually come in the wrapper of something like, “because that’s our process.” Metrics are gathered for the sake of reports no one acts on. Information is collected to feed otherwise ignored databases. People fill out forms to protect the company from a long-forgotten infraction.Policies and processes we adopt over time are corporate inventory. We have to maintain them, administer them, and be annoyed by them. All these actions are waste.The tricky thing here is that all policies can be defended by “what if” arguments. “We can’t get rid of that policy … what if someone does something bad?”Well, what if someone does something bad? How likely is that to occur?We know for certain that the waste is making the group less effective when subjected to the policy. What is the likelihood of your What If?A gross example of this is airport delay post 9-11. The 9-11 hijackings had nothing to do with airport screening points. They were a systemic breakdown (and a highly improbable one) of the global intelligence network. Yet, the 631,939,829 people who flew in 2010 all were delayed at least one hour by needing to get to the airport early, stand in line, and subject themselves to security policies. At about 40,000 as an average income, this quickly pencils out to about 12.5 billion dollars worth of delay every year. That delay can be easily compounded by the lost time of collaboration that people have endure by leaving the office early.The What Ifs here are obvious. But so are the costs. Are there better ways of dealing with terrorist threats than incurring billions of dollars in passenger delay?Other examples are regular reports that show the progress of various business metrics. One company we visited generated a weekly report of dozens of pages and nearly 100 metrics every week. Not only did report generation take more than a combined 40 hours to produce (an obvious cost), it delayed the very projects it was trying to measure. In the end, the overwhelming number of charts, graphs, and numbers created a culture of managing by the numbers while totally ignoring what was really happening. Managers would comb through the document until they found the metric or two that went in the wrong direction, then they’d come to find out why.More often than not, the why was a normal fluctuation in the number. The conversation was waste, the “analysis” was waste, and the generation was waste. But those receiving the report had become so fixated on it that they couldn’t see beyond it. “What if we didn’t have this report? We’d never know what was going on!”Examine your policies regularly. Make sure that you don’t have policies to create waste. Photo by Anders V

Just Released: Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias, Decision Making, and Your Business.

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A few months ago, I wrote a series of posts in this blog about cognitive bias. Those became the pre-writing for this short ebook: Why Plans Fail.It’s $2.99, or free if you have Amazon Prime.This is the first in our new MemeMachine Series, which will be little eBooks like this that introduce a topic and begin discussions.Here’s the writeup for it from Amazon:Business runs on decisions. Recently, we've discovered that people aren't the great decision makers we thought they were.Business relies on estimates, plans, and projections - and we all know how accurate they tend to be. Careers are made, careers are broken based on accurate estimation and planning.But what if the successes and failures of these projects were not based on the prowess of those making the plans? What if success or failure were more often the result of a more complex set of events?Why Plans Fail directly addresses our ability of to plan, to forecast, and to make decisions.Written by Jim Benson, an urban planner, software developer, and business owner who has planned and built everything from small software projects, to houses, to urban freeway systems - Why Plans Fail is told by someone with much skin in the estimation and planning game.This short work is the first in the Modus Cooperandi Mememachine series - which looks specifically at underlying issues that directly impact the success of teams, companies, and individuals. The Mememachine series is meant to start conversations and advance discussion.

How To: Setting Your Personal WIP Limit

There are only two rules in Personal Kanban.

Visualize Your Work

and

Limit Your Work in Progress

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Since there are only two, it stands to reason that they are both important, vital even. When people see the value stream and the stickies, they feel they’ve received clear direction in setting up a Personal Kanban’s visualization. But how to come up with a number for your WIP limit?This is much easier to describe, but much harder to get the point across.

Start With 3

Why do we start with 3? 3 seems to be a good rule-of-thumb number. Three stickies are easy to see, easy to grasp. Three tasks will always be visible on a computer screen. They are easy to remember.Three is also a good balance number. Three is large enough to involve multiple stakeholders, but is small enough to manage. Three is a large enough number for other people to respect. One tasks becomes a zero-sum game where people can argue for hours about how you are using your time, three spreads out your work footprint to involve enough different things to diffuse such arguments.But three is not the only number. It’s just a handy, arbitrary one.

What We Want To Do Goal:

The goal in setting a WIP limit in Personal Kanban is to ensure that we do not take on more work than we can handle.Fact: People obsess over the WIP limit number because it is a number, which they take to be a rule. “If my WIP Limit is 3, I can never ever do more than 3 things.”That’s dangerous.Emergencies are EmergenciesIf you’re in the middle of a report, some accounting, and waiting for a team member to reply to an email - and your WIP limit is three – you have met your WIP Limit.If all that stuff is happening and you have a heart attack – you should deal with the heart attack even if it breaks your WIP. Don’t type faster to finish your report so you can pull the heart attack sticky!What we want for that WIP Limit to do is keep reminding us at all times that we are much more effective if we limit our work-in-progress. Emergencies will remain emergencies, they are real, we must attend to them.

Variation in our Capacity

Let’s look at Karl on three consecutive Mondays:Monday 1: Karl wakes up after a relaxing weekend. He eats a good breakfast. He is ready to attack the day. He arrives at work and finds his partner June equally ready. Together they feed off mutual creative energy and the day is off to an excited start.Monday 2: Karl wakes up after a stressful weekend. He slept little last night and is now hitting snooze over and over again. He misses breakfast and stumbles into the office late. He’s searching for enthusiasm.Monday 3: Karl wakes up, the weekend was fine, but he’s distracted – something doesn’t feel right. He gets to the office and he and June discuss this feeling he’s having. They spend the morning sipping coffee and talking until they finally figure out what is bothering Karl. It is an oversight they’ve had with their new product line. Luckily, it is something that they can work out. He and June spend the rest of the day coming up with solutions to the problem.In all these instances, Karl – the very same Karl – has a different capacity for new tasks each day. One Monday 1 it might be 3, on Monday 2 it might be2 and on Monday 3 it is probably just 1.Our WIP limits therefore can vary with our moods and our context.Don’t feel that your WIP limit is an advised speed at which you must travel at all times. If you are tired or need to focus, by all means, drop to a lower number of tasks.

Diet and WIP Limit

Studies have shown that throughout the day our glucose levels also fluctuate throughout the day. In the mid-morning and mid-afternoon, we are susceptible to dangerous drops in glucose that make our brains fuzzy, our decision-making questionable, and our productivity low.This is why smart businesses have fridges stocked with juices and bananas. (At Modus, Tonianne and I have apple breaks). This is also why energy drinks go flying off the shelves after lunch.Human beings are amazing machines, but we still need to be tended to. Our brains use a tremendous amount of our body’s energy – 20% of our total energy usage or more. The brain, after all, is running on electrical charges and the more you think the more you produce.If you let yourself get run down, your WIP will drop accordingly.The same is true for sleep and rest.

Conclusion: You Gotta Use Your Brain

You, whether you like it or not, are the one who has the information necessary to set a personal WIP limit. You are a system that is self-regulating. You choose when to rest, when to eat, when to drink water. You know what external pressures are resting upon you.Starting with 3 is always safe.But know your variation. Photo by Tonianne