WIP can be Imposed

Please don't feel bad if you find you've lost control of your WIP.The two rules of Personal Kanban:1. Visualize Your Work2. Limit WIPWith a little practice, #1 becomes easy...second nature, even.Number 2 is, well, pretty much a bitch to master.It is better stated as a goal.  On a good workday, when things are flowing, we can limit our WIP and feel quite good about that.What gets in the way of being able to totally master our WIP is the expectations of others. When people expect things from us, even if we've conveniently de-prioritized them, they let us know: "Where's that report?" "I thought you were coming over to visit today." "When are you going to mail that book to me?"The telephone, instant messaging, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, fax, and just plain old screaming give people ample ways to contribute to the existential overhead that you would just as soon get to later.Often these demands for your attention are highly emotional. People you want to spend more time with but can't. People whom you care about but drive you crazy. People who need legitimate but time-consuming things from you. People who need to work with you but have massively different working styles that will slow you down.This creates a lot of stress.There is little in life we can do about the actions or expectations of others. We talk about expectation management, and can do a fair job of it by being clear about what we can do and when, but people are going make demands of us whether we like it or not.Personal Kanban reacts to this stress by allowing easy re-prioritization of tasks.  You don't think cleaning the garage is all that important.  You wife has a very different opinion.  Her priorities matter, too.This sometimes means that we will need to reprioritize tasks and from time to time these will be tasks already in WIP.Is that good? No.Is it tolerable? Not really.But it is necessary. We simply won't always have the luxury of completion.Again, Personal Kanban is aimed at getting you to visual and understand work's flow - total control is an illusion. Do not be afraid to let reality guide your Personal Kanban.

WIP and Priorization: Recommended Portions

You've been hiking all morning and the mercury is nearing 100. You're parched. You need water - lots of it.  But even in your thirst, you want that water to be manageable.Which holds more water - a lake or a drinking glass?Which will satisfy your thirst - a fire hose or a drinking fountain?Whether it is water or work, limiting the portion size of something we are consuming actually makes it more useful. We do not lap from the pool or attempt to drink from the firehose's blast.In Lean, we limit work in progress (WIP) not just to slow people down and get them to focus, but to increase throughput. Standard procedure is to drink work from the proverbial firehose. All too often we try to do too much, too fast. And when we can't, and our productivity suffers, we feel we've failed.We have a throughput, our time is a finite resource. We are finite resources.When we limit our WIP, we acknowledge this.Pulling a task from our backlog into our WIP means that we are now using that very finite, very valuable resource. We want to make sure that the task we’ve chosen is of the highest importance.Of course “highest importance” is contextual. Some days it’s work for a given client, other days it’s specific tasks, and still others it’s work that fits in the small time slots you have to work.This isn’t just simple prioritizing of one thing over another. Your brain quickly picks up not only on your limited time but of the trade-offs that limited time generates.  You begin to conduct detailed risk assessments – naturally. I could do this large task for this client, or I could get these 10 little things off my plate – making me more able to focus tomorrow.  Or vice versa.Personal Kanban helps uncover what is really causing the most stress. Those little unfinished tasks, or that big glaring responsibility.  We’re all wired slightly but appreciably differently. Our flow charts similarly have their quirks.

Personal Kanban: Tangible Tasks Produce Prioritization

Planning and prioritizing is a wicked problem that has plagued humankind since time immemorial. – Corey Ladas

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Human beings want three things in life: sex, money and effective prioritization.There appears to be a logical and linear three-stage process of better prioritization as you become familiar with kanban. The process follows the three main characteristics of the cardwall and how they insidiously work their way into your psyche.Stage One: The VisualSimply viewing the tasks on the kanban cardwall makes them conspicuous. The tasks on the card wall have a shape or a volume. They consume space on your board and you can only fit so many on at a time.  Your brain sees this and suddenly, perhaps for the first time, your workload has a coherent form.  It may be overwhelming, but you can now see it.A necessary drive for prioritization stems from this physical form.  You want to only fit tasks in that finite space that are going to do the most for you. At this point, you’re most likely to do this by sight, as you complete one task you’ll grab the next one that “looks best”. Let’s call this immediate gratification prioritization.  It’s better than letting fate guide you and an excellent start.Stage Two: The PermanentThe cardwall is on the wall and it is permanent. You don’t put it in a box at night. You don’t hide it when the boss stops by. The cardwall is your professional superego. It is reminding you of what you are doing, why it benefits society, and what will happen to you if you don’t finish. If you have colleagues, they can see what you are doing. if your personal kanban is shared they may even have a stake in your task completion. In this case, you may want to start having some logical prioritization that might resemble Corey’s Priority Filter.  Corey’s Priority Filter creates “buckets” with limited capacity that show tasks trickling down from your backlog into your ready-queue.  Here, you are starting to plan for future prioritization. At any time, you can rearrange things, but the priority filter lets you set up a prioritization that shares the same permanence as the kanban itself. Each part of the ready-queue Let’s call this progressive filtration.Stage Three: The TactileThe cardwall is tactile. You have to reach up and grab something and move it around. As it moves, it has a flow. You begin to see how you collect, collaborate on, and complete different kinds of tasks. Even in the most chaotic of situations, there are rhythms to types of work. What is happening now? You are constantly doing work and therefore constantly physically interacting with the board. At this point, prioritization itself begins to get a flow. You recognize that as tasks enter your backlog, some will seem more important on some days that others. Some have higher value to the team than others.Corey and Eric Willeke asynchronously put their heads together and came up with Perpetual Multivote. This process recognizes that good decision making has both temporal and social components. As context changes over time for people, what seems important also changes. Perpetual multivote places backlog items on a visual board. Voters get a certain number of tokens and can vote any time and as much they want for the upcoming backlog items until they run out of tokens. They can reallocate their tokens whenever they want as well. They see how their peers vote and can make their decisions based on that context. In the picture above each line is a backlog item and each dot is a vote from a team member.Perpetual multivote clearly represents the tactile nature of the cardwall.  It might be called contextual prioritization.Do You See What’s Happening Here?Right now some of the most popular games for portable platforms like the Nintendo DS are games like Brain Age that help you train your brain. They’re like the antidote for cage fighting. These games work not so much by teaching you math or algebra, but by getting your brain to react to certain stimuli that promote attentiveness, appropriate response and retention.Your brain can learn to think “better” simply by being sensitized to the actions of better thinking.Kanban does this as well by creating a physical space (the cardwall) in which these concepts (tasks) can live - where the human brain can grasp and manipulate them better. As people, we learn in different ways. Some of us are visual learners, others are auditory, some contextual, some literal…. Vive la différence, sure – but for those who have tried to manage la différence … history is filled with managerial pain and anguish.Cardwalls tend to equalize varying learning styles by presenting information with a logical flow and cadence. Everyone from your scattered ADHDer to your hyperfocused Asperberger can grasp a kanban – because it does have elements of context for all learning styles.Like Brain Age, kanban starts to train our brains to see work in a new way. Not as an unfocused pile of tasks and subtasks and subsubtasks, but as a set of tasks with very real impacts on our lives. As we begin to see the form and flow of these tasks, our abilities to prioritize can improve.This is post four in my personal kanban series.Kanban examples built in AgileZen, review coming soon.Multivote image from Corey’s Multivote blog post. (why mess with perfection?)