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workflow

Are You Just Doing Things?

bp1

I’ll bet you have a lot of things to do. 

Of course you do.We all do.A Personal Kanban anti-pattern that I’m seeing is that people are filling their kanbans with things to do and then...doing them.They are becoming productivity machines. And that’s...really bad.Look, there’s a limitless amount of things to do and you can become super efficient and do much more of them than you ever dreamed possible. And if you do that, soon you will burn out.So I ask you, Why not figure out which work is important?This happened to us recently at Modus. We had our board which we’d been using for a year. The backlog was filling up with tasks that could be done, but didn’t necessarily need to be done.At client sites and in classes, we frequently use our own board as an example. And our board clearly showed this anti-pattern.So we did a few things that I will recommend today:1. Categorize the Backlog - We divided our backlog into sequestered categories of projects. This helped us see where projects were in their completion and what areas of work were taking up most of our time.2. Clean Up the Backlog - Clean up the backlog by deleting old tasks that have aged out or that people want to care about but don’t really care about.3. Pick Dominant and Secondary Projects - One project at any given time should be your main focus. There will always be immediate, context-specific, daily tasks you need to do - but one project should be focused on and completed. Secondary projects are those which need to be done, but are either not the immediate focus or are supporting that focus.4. Clean Up the Done Column - Done columns can fill up, especially when we are hyper-productive. Soon we have our boards laden with stickies covering each other and we don’t know what we did, when we did it, or why we did it that way. Dirty done columns are worse than to-do lists.What you might notice in these four steps is that we didn’t prioritize our tasks, we didn’t make big plans, we altered the board to flow better and our the relationship to the work to be more focused.In the next four posts, I’ll talk more about each one in depth.Written in Mesa, Arizona

Doing GTD Kanban Style #1

This is the first post in a three-part guest series, Doing GTD Kanban Style by Pascal Venier. You can read the second post in the series here.When Jim Benson encouraged me a while back to write something about how I am combining Personal Kanban & Getting Things Done, I thought this was an excellent idea. This was the more so as it was extremely timely for me to pose and reflect on my experience, 8 years after starting to implement GTD, and about a year after discovering Personal Kanban. I started drafting a blog post on how in my experience they play extremely well together. However, what was initially intended to be written in the form of a single post has irresistibly grown into a series of posts. In this first post, I would like to start by describing Getting Things Done and what it involves.

Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free productivity is the title of a book published at the very beginning of the last decade by David Allen, a personal productivity consultant and speaker based in Ojay, California. It has quickly become a best-seller and has rapidly drawn a huge following. It is now one of the classics of the personal productivity literature. The purpose of the GTD method is to help people becoming more productive by gaining control of their workflows. This is achieved by implementing a simple 5 stages process - “a phenomenal piece of mental artistry” in the late Marc Orchant’s words - which involves collecting, processing, organizing, review and doing. As an image is worth 1,000 words, the processing system has been elegantly synthesized in the now famous GTD Workflow diagram and more recently as a cool infographics, the GTD workflow map.A first basic principle is to be quite systematically collecting not only all the “stuff” coming into your life (letters, documents, emails, etc.) but also emptying your head and writing down everything that has your attention.It is then a matter of quite systematically processing all the inputs coming in your system. This triage process uses simple yet effective filters by asking three questions: “what is it?”, “is it actionable?” and if it is actionable, “what is the next action?” ; determining what is the next action is quite central to the whole system. A particularity of GTD is that anything involving more than one action is a project.Organizing involves using a very clear structure and “clear buckets”. Items which are not actionable are disposed of (trash), set aside to incubate (someday-maybe folder) or stored for future retrieval (reference materials). A simple system of lists and folders is used to keep track of actionable items (next actions, time sensitive items and events, “waiting for” items which have been delegated, as well as projects and projects support materials).Systematically reviewing the system on a regular basis is essential to the implementation of GTD. This involves reviewing constantly what Next Actions need to be executed, but also conducting ritual weekly reviews in order to process the in-box, take stock of all the open loops, Next Actions, projects, and keeping them aligned with one’s areas of responsibility and focus and your longer terms goals and vision.Finally, it is a matter of doing, for in the end this is all about Getting things DONE. A key here is that a lot of what will be involved will consist in predefined work, whilst keeping enough flexibility for being able to be responsive to what may come up and need immediate attention.If Getting Things Done is about becoming more productive, it is in no way a matter of simply keeping your nose to the proverbial grindstone, far from it. It also involves another dimension, alas for too often neglected or misunderstood, which helps taking things to the next level, by going beyond productivity and striving towards effectiveness. Gaining perspective is quite crucial to this end and the Getting Things Done method also involves a second framework, the six-levels of the horizons of focus. This is a matter of looking at your work bottom-up, starting from the ground up, from the runway, i.e. the Next Actions you need to accomplish, and rising progressively in order to get an eagle-eye view of what you are doing and would like to do in the future, right up to you life values at 50,000 feet. The six horizons of focus include:

  • 50,000 feet : Life purpose

  • 40,000 feet : vision of long-term success (3-5 years)

  • 30,000 feet : one-to-two-years goals

  • 20,000 feet : current areas of responsibilities

  • 10,000 feet : current projects

  • Runway : current next actions

These six-levels allow you to map what you are currently doing to make sure that they are aligned with your goals and vision for the future, but also all importantly atoned with what you see as your Life purpose.Over the last eight years, practicing the GTD method has proven incredibly valuable to me. I would like in my next post to reflect on my experience of trying to make it all work and identify some of the recurrent challenges I have been confronted with, before looking at how Personal Kanban has helped me take my GTD implementation to the next level.

The Pen: The Handoff Column

Modus Board with the Pen

In our work, we have tasks we need to do, tasks we are doing, and tasks we’ve completed. We know we have a WIP limit and that we shouldn’t exceed it. But tasks aren’t always as tidy as we’d like. We don’t just start tasks and work until they’re DONE. Tasks, very often, involve input from others over whom we have little or no control.

For this purpose, Tonianne and I use THE PEN. In the board to our right (our actual board), you can see that Toni started working on getting a contract amended and then had to send that off for review and comment. While it’s gone, we don’t want to take her away from her other tasks. So she’s moved it into The Pen where it will reside until the outside party has done their bit.

We are blessed on this day to only have one item in THE PEN. Ordinarily we have five or six. When they stack up, it’s a sign that we’ve let them linger too long and should follow up on the tickets. We will also, if need be, set a deadline or a reminder on tasks in THE PEN. Today, that’s not the case – she’s reasonably sure that she’ll get a reply sometime by the end of the week.  However, if tasks are going to sit in THE PEN for a long time or if there is a deadline we have to meet, we will certainly set a date to check on it.

We want to limit our WIP to lighten our cognitive load and let us focus. However, we will often find ourselves in a position where we have several things waiting action by others. It’s okay to sequester these tasks and move ahead with active work.

How To: Mapping Your Value Stream

When we build our kanban – whether for ourselves or for a team – we first need to build a value stream. A value stream is simply a list of the steps you take to create value. When we build a kanban, work flows along the value stream and this visualizes our flow.

Before We Begin

There are some quick tips about a value stream.

  1. It should match reality as closely as possible.

  2. It should be only as detailed as necessary to see and understand your work flow.

  3. As your understanding and contexts change, your value stream will also change.

These three tips are telling. Words like stream,flow, and value are all difficult to pin down. They change, they evolve. In tip number one, we want to match reality as closely as possible. We will never draw a map that perfectly matches our workflow forever.

The Beginning: Start with the Ends in Mind

What is it you are doing?In a meeting you may be:

  • fully discussing a topic

  • coming up with action items

  • planning a future set of tasks

At home you might be:

  • delegating chores

  • planning a vacation

  • building a deck

During the workday you might be:

  • creating documents

  • managing staff

  • building a section of an airplane

Kanban End States

All nine of these might have very different end-states.So, if we are writing a report, the end state might be “publish.”The other end … your backlog … is usually called “Backlog” or “Ready”. That is where your value stream starts. So, for our publishing value stream, our backlog looks like this:

Next Step: Fill in the Blanks

Full Sample Value Stream

Between start and finish is creation. What steps do you take to create something? Working backwards from publish, we might have collation, before that is final, before that is second draft, and before that might be the first draft.This now starts to build a stream into which the specific sections of the report can flow. The report team can now track each section or chapter as it moves toward completion.

Important Bits to Remember

1. Your value stream is your best educated guess as to how your work is actually occurring.

For some teams, the value stream above will work nicely. They would likely have a report that is from a template and being updated or customized, because the value stream suggests a very orderly process with no surprises or constant re-writes. Other teams will have a value stream that visualizes more editing, document re-organization, or people involved.

2. Your value stream will change.

As mentioned above, your value stream will change as you better understand your work. You do not need to sit around for a month figuring out the perfect mapping of your value stream. Just get one up and start working. You can refine as you move along. Different phases of projects may require very different value streams. Do not allow yourself to fall into the trap of rigid process.

3. Your Value Stream is Fault Tolerant

If you move a stickie to the right and something changes to make you move it back to the left – this is not a problem. It is reality. You really did move a chapter from the first draft to the second draft, conditions changed and then it moved back to the first draft stage again.

This is a Personal Kanban 101 Post. See others in the series.

The Psychology of Kanban (Video)

In November, 2010, Jim Benson spoke at the Oredev conference in Malmo, Sweden on Energizing the Individual Coder and the Psychology of Kanban.Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban - Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo..

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