What Are Your Task Types?

Flexibility is an unsung virtue. People want absolutes: "Do this, then do that, don't deviate and then you'll achieve success." But we all know that absolutes are often false, and that context is king - in life, in work, and in all human endeavor.So limiting our WIP needs to take context into account, even WIP limiting needs to be flexible. Sometimes tasks just don't behave themselves. Some are extremely urgent, while others become mired down for whatever reason. Both of these scenarios demand respect.I recently had a session with a personal coaching client who has just begun using Personal Kanban. He had set up a few rather detailed value streams, but was having trouble limiting his WIP because different task types were causing conflicts.At Seattle Lean Coffee, the topic of task types has come up at almost every meeting.It's clear we need to talk about task types here.So, let's examine the case of a coder, whom we'll call Richard.A hired gun, with a busy home and work life, Richard is juggling multiple commitments. His primary client is a company that uses an esoteric software system to run their business. Not only is Richard one of only a few (less than 5) individuals on earth familiar with this particular package, the others are not interested in working with it any more.Over the course of each month, Richard receives tasks from his client. These tasks come with some - but not rigorous - prioritization. Every so often though, a bug will surface that impacts the company's operations, and Richard will need to drop what he's doing and focus instead on that bug.Over the years, the system Richard is "lucky" enough to be stewarding has been touched by a succession of coders resulting in a tangled mass of spaghetti code that is undocumented, and often difficult to read.Think of it as the Winchester Mystery House of source code.All too often, problems often arise requiring additional work just to locate the issue, not to mention having to test and find the impacts of any changes he might make.From his experience, Richard has identified five main task types:

• Easy tasks - these are straightforward, can be done quickly, and will require minimal testing;

• Normal tasks - these can be done in a few days without much, if any, outside interaction;

• Hard tasks - these are tasks that will require a lot (or at least an unknown amount) of work and research;

• Escalated tasks - these are tasks that cause the client discomfort and need to move to the front of the queue; and

• Emergency tasks - these are tasks that displace the work already in process and become in-process.

For Richard who is working solo and off-site, parsing his tasks out like this is invaluable. Since his client has had little visibility into his workload, he's begun using an online Personal Kanban tool to create a workflow that he can share with his client. Tasks are colored according to their type, allowing the client transparency into the mix of work he has.Right now, the client has no way of knowing the grades of severity of tasks. Tasks that sound simple to the client can sometimes be difficult in the code. Similarly, tasks sound hard may actually be very straightforward. When the client is waiting for results, it's important for them to know which tasks look easy or hard. This will directly inform the client's risk assessment of setting Richard loose on a particular task. If he identifies one as hard, the client can then re-assess the priority of the task and the investment it might require.With client access to Richard's Personal Kanban, and task types clearly differentiated, clients can work alongside Richard to prioritize and schedule specific tasks. This will increase mutual understanding by giving them something visual and tangible to speak to when they have their regular meetings. Work can always be re-prioritized on-the-fly by mutual agreement. With transparency into Richard's workflow, the client will be less inclined to feel behind schedule because level of difficulty is now understood.Richard can now use all this information to help guide what items to pull when he's moving from one task to the next. Escalated and Emergency tasks are self-evident and should be rare (if they aren't rare, that points to other problems we'll talk about in a later blog post). Beyond those, Richard's risk assessment for pulling specific tasks is based on an amalgam of client priorities and available time.If he looks into his backlog and, if he has only a few hours, he can pull out an Easy task. If he has a few days, he can pull a normal task, etc. His risk profile for pulling tasks is now informed by these task types.And yes, this is all fine until some task goes wrong. Which of course will happen. This we'll cover tomorrow in the post "When Tasks Don't Go Right."Photo by Jeffc5000

Dependencies in Personal Kanban

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Dependencies are things that occur in succession. One thing happens, then another thing can happen. Ideally, on a kanban, the value stream will visualize these transitions. For a value stream like this:Analysis -> Creation -> Refinement -> Launchrefinement is dependent on both analysis and creation.That neatly takes care of dependencies, but in our Personal Kanban we really don't want to have to come up with new value streams for every little project we are doing. So we need to come up with ways to visualize dependencies that will let us maintain a simple value stream.So let's look at a few ways we can do that. As always, these are suggestions and we'd love to see how other people work this out.Task NotationWe can simply notate tasks with where they lie in a stream of pre-requisites. Noting what comes before can help us not prematurely pull a task, letting us know what comes next can help us raise that next task in priority ones it's antecedent task is completed.Scheduled EscalationSometimes tasks become relevant on or around a specific date. What we can do is place tasks that need escalation on a certain date on an actual calendar. When that date comes, take the task off the calendar and place it in backlog. If is has a due date, be sure to note that date on the sticky.Sticky StacksTasks that neatly follow one another can simply stack. When a task is pulled, its next task is seen in the backlog. Sticky stacks can also nicely visualize a project without taking up too much space.--So that's it. Some quick ways to deal with dependencies outside the value stream. Of course, do look in Design Patterns to see if you can find ways to deal more elegantly with specific projects.

The Priority Filter: A Tutorial

Prioritization is often even more difficult and daunting as the tasks that confront you. A priority filter in your Personal Kanban helps you determine what tasks are ready in your queue, and the order of importance they should assume.  

Click on the video below for a quick priority filter tutorial.Note: This video is best viewed full screen.

Am I Productive, Efficient, or Effective?

Productivity: having the power to produceEfficiency: the ratio of the output to the input of any systemEffectiveness: being able to bring about a desired result

Personal Kanban is considered a Productivity tool, because it gives us the power to produce more.  It is likewise said to increase Efficiency by limiting WIP and increasing focus which means we expend less energy to affect results. This in turn boosts our Effectiveness by providing the information necessary to make better decisions and act on them.Often people have bursts of productivity, efficiency, or effectiveness – but because they aren’t paying attention to what they're doing, these events are sometimes dismissed as happy accidents. Personal Kanban makes your work explicit, meaning it constantly shows you what you are doing and what you could be doing. This helps you interpret your options and prioritize you tasks based on current conditions. Personal Kanban also lets us balance productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and turn them into three parts of the same machine.Individually, bursts look like this:

• Bursts of productivity – You get a lot done, but is it the right stuff?

• Bursts of efficiency – Work is easily done, but is it focused for maximum effect?

• Bursts of effectiveness – The right work is done at the right time … this time. Is this process repeatable?

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I call these bursts “hero” events. Over time, things get screwed up and you have to call in a “hero” to fix them quickly. That hero may be you, a temp worker, a consultant, or a friend. But you identify a need so late in the game that you need to work above and beyond to complete the task at hand.What’s funny is that after these hero events, we feel good. And because we feel good, we think, “That was awesome!” and we ascribe the event to something exceptional. Something that just couldn’t possibly happen every day.During a recent project in Washington, D.C., I worked alongside members of the Intelligence Community. More than one of them told me that people in the IC  who allegedly had cushy desk jobs inside the Beltway, routinely volunteered for live fire assignments.These people specifically volunteered to be in harm’s way.Why? Because it was a period of sustained productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. People did not have the "luxury" to relentlessly and constantly prioritize. In the field there is no choice but to constantly re-evaluate conditions and re-prioritize actions. Because picking the most important task was the only way to survive, the only way to complete the mission.There was a mission. There was survival. And those two conjoined drivers created a great deal of focus.Hopefully we don't have to risk our lives simply to focus on our work. Personal Kanban provides the structure to allow us to choose the right work for maximum effect repeatably.For more on how to choose the "right" work, and then how to make sure your processes are repeatable see Prioritization and Retrospectives.Photo by Randy Son of Robert.

Urgent and Important: Incorporating your existing tools into Personal Kanban

We’ve devised Personal Kanban to adapt to any system you might currently use (unless of course your preferred  system is utter chaos). The only two rules are visualize your work and limit work-in-progress (WIP). PK's main goal is to get you to write things down and begin to watch how and what you complete.Last week, Eva Schiffer of Net-Map wrote me and said:

I have just erased my to do list and transformed it in something kanban-like. My own to do list format, that always worked well for me, had 4 categories:Important and urgentImportant, less urgentLess important, urgentLess important, less urgent.That helps me a lot because I normally love the less important, less urgent tasks, and while they often lead to really interesting creative outcomes, it is important for me to keep procrastination at bay and make sure that I don't just impress myself with the number of tasks performed, but also do those things that are most urgent and/or important.

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Major Tom's Backlog

This got me thinking about the relationship between productivity and effectiveness. Eva recognized that simply increasing her throughput was not enough, that was mere mindless productivity.What Eva was searching for was effectiveness.At Modus, we do dynamic prioritization using a priority filter that looks like this:For Tonianne and myself, this works wonders. We constantly have a short list of items that need doing, and as they move from 3 to 2 to 1 they become more important. However, prioritization is a contextual exercise that varies from moment to moment. As we can see here, “Eat all the chicken on earth” is Priority 2, but that could suddenly change to Priority 1 if suddenly I were in a place where all the chicken on earth was accessible.Eva, like many organized people, uses a matrix to ascribe values of urgency and importance, which results in something like this:In the case of Major Tom, he has been sent into space to find out what’s there. He’s a celebrity and everyone is watching him. There are a variety of things he could be doing up there, but he has a a backlog that varies between levels of urgency and importance.So for example, the papers want to know whose shirts he wears. That’s important both to his individual fame and to the space program in general because after all, it’s being good to the press. But at the moment, he’s in space so he can get to that later.If the press scores an interview while he’s up there, though, it can become relevant and therefore is something to complete.So we reach Major Tom here in the middle of his work day. He’s already managed to tell his wife he loves her very much, and he's stepped outside the capsule. He’s put his previously active conversation with ground control on hold because at the moment, he's working on other things. And he’s now floating in a most peculiar way (and noticing how different the stars look).Major Tom is still limiting his WIP and he’s still visualizing, even if his backlog is drawn as a matrix rather than columns. The matrix is a familiar organizational tool for him, and it should be preserved. (Although he probably should have checked his instruments.)So Eva’s concern is very real - we stand a real risk of becoming mindless production units, grinding tasks out at hyper-speed without assessing their value. The key with Personal Kanban is to assess the value of what you are doing – however it is that you define value.We’re all individuals – quality, value and growth are different for us all.Not only that but quality, value and growth are also contextual. Today, home repair might be very low on your list. After a tornado, however, it's probably going to be pretty high. Did you put it there? No. Life did. Context shifted. For that reason, just-in-time dynamic re-prioritization is key for workload management.So be like Eva. Find the way you define your work - visualize it, and thoughtfully examine how you can best be effective.