Every Task is Sacred

One of the primary goals of a kanban is to make value explicit. When you spend your time doing something, the reward should be observable. Even if the task is vegging out, the reward is relaxation. You should engage in no task that is valueless. When a task does not provide value, it is considered waste.

Kanban has two main states: a "station,” where value is created, and a “transition,” where the work item is moved from one station to the next. In the kanban below, we see the flow of work for my upcoming book, Instant Karma: 10 Principles of Social Media for Business. In the pre-writing phase, I am creating the initial text for a chapter. When that’s done, and my editor is ready to look at it, she pulls a completed section from my pre-writing section and places it in her “focus” state. There she and I edit and re-edit that chapter until we think it is ready to send off to the crowdsourcers. I was creating value in the pre-writing state, when that value was realized it then went on to the next state of focus, where it remains until that value is realized.

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In the kanban above we see that what is moving is not tasks – but the actual chapter. In a work-flow kanban tasks are the mechanics that create value, not the value itself. The value is explicit in the work-flow. Thus, in a kanban, the work-flow is also called a value-stream.

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Here we have a task based kanban where I have the task of “Call Bob.”  It’s going to run through my simplistic Backlog | Doing | Done kanban.  But, let’s think about this a bit.  Regardless of my feelings for Bob, does calling Bob ever give me actual value?  No. "Call Bob" is merely a task, a mechanical action that should create value.

Later, if I am going over completed tasks and trying to figure out what makes me successful and what does not, “Call Bob” is a lousy artifact for judgment. There simply isn’t enough information there to let me make a decision.

So why not make the value explicit?

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Here my reason for calling Bob is made more explicit.It could be anything you want from “talk about football” to “catch up.” Remember: Kanban isn’t making value judgments of your actions, it's simply reporting the value of what you accomplished. If you really like Bob, and want to call him just to shoot the breeze, that’s value to you. It’s fine. What you want is to discover tasks that don’t provide value and eliminate them, so you have more time to do what makes your life better.

Images created in Agile Zen, which I am loving.

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.

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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.

Why Retrospectives?

In both Agile and Lean management there are points called "retrospectives," regular and ritualized moments where a team stops to reflect. Checking processes for only a few minutes lets you re-orient the course of your work. These retrospectives allow a team the opportunity not only to celebrate or bemoan accomplishments or setbacks, but likewise to serve as a constructive way to create and direct their course.  A retrospective shows us that things either went well or they didn’t, understanding that either way, there is always room for plotting the effectiveness of future work.

Over the past few months, I've spoken with many people who've begun to use personal kanban. During the course of this thread, many of them have shared how they've started to deploy Kanban as a collaborative tool, using it to plan, prioritize, and do work both at home and in their place of business. Now we have to go that last step - we have to think about what we’ve done.

Whether it’s on our own, with our families, or with a team, a retrospective is vital in being able to identify, elucidate, and enact positive change. Retrospectives can take place at whatever intervals you are comfortable with, and for whatever period of time. Again, I’m not writing a how-to manual here, these tools should help you or your group manage tasks in a way that works best for you.

We can - and will - discuss a range of options for what a retrospective might look like.  But just like a kanban can reside on a white board, a piece of paper, a computer screen, or even a kitchen appliance, a retrospective is what works at the time.  If you are just finishing a project in the garage or on day 4 of hurricane disaster relief, checking your processes for only a few minutes will let you improve what you're doing

You don’t have to fly to Pluto to gain from small course corrections. You want to always be fine-tuning your workflow and your work management. In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about a variety of retrospective styles – some that are thought exercises and others with statistical rigor. Whatever you prefer, there should be one for you and your team.

Note: When Kanban is working really well, and you have an intimate understanding of your work, then you will achieve what Lean calls a "kaizen state,"  a culture of continuous improvement. At that point, you are constantly doing retrospectives simply because you are so aware of your actions, and a such, a separate retrospective may not be necessary.

NewHorizons2015 is NASA’s Pluto Mission – which requires both course corrections and a whole lot of delayed gratification.