Invigorating this group... (was:Re: One Full Year)

[Adam Yuret]

I think Jim's onto something there. We're in the group for a reason and it might be good to try and identify what we'd like to get out of it? 

I like the idea of discussing interesting pitfalls and lessons we've learned when using Personal Kanban to improve our lives. Maybe hearing how some have used this method at work, or in various different contexts. 

I'll start: 

Pitfalls: 

I'm terrible and limiting my WIP to what's on the board and sometimes am a poor kanban policeman (I know there is no kanban police) I'll sometimes just go careening off and all but forget my board exists. Sometimes this is from a lack of personal discipline sometimes external forces dictate how my time is used (e.g. a 1 yr old baby doesn't care what is in my current WIP column) 

Work: 

I've kept a limited personal kanban at my desk so anybody can drop by and see what I'm doing at a glance. I'll even include some personal work like "Lunch with wife" or "Buying boat parts" so people can see my distractions. 

Is this the kind of thing for which we might use this list? 

Discuss, invigorate. :-)  

Cheers, 

Adam Yuret

Mr. Manager
The Banana Stand
Santa Cruz 27 #104

"There's always money in the banana stand." -George Bluth Sr.

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM, Jim Benson <j...@moduscooperandi.com> wrote:

Hello everyone,

In February, the Personal Kanban book has just celebrated its first full year of life. The community unknowingly celebrated by giving us the most active month of tweets, blog posts, and sales ever. :-)

It's been an amazing, crazy, uplifting, and sometime heartwrenching year for Tonianne and myself.

I want to do a few things in this e-mail.

(1) Give you in the Google Group and discount code for the book that you are free (welcome, encouraged) to pass along to your friends, relatives, and colleagues.

• The discount code is FJSPA92A and is for 20% off the book. (I'm sorry, Amazon doesn't allow me to give discounts on the kindle, I wish they did)
• The site to buy it is here: https://www.createspace.com/3481556

(2) Begin to invigorate this Google Group. One of my resolutions this year is to get this group up and active. We have the best practitioners of Personal Kanban right here in the list. So I will do my best to seed conversations and get us discussing and working together. 

(3) Invite you, as well, to get into the discussions - or even start them - here. I mean, we all subscribed to this - so we must want to use it? Let's build an active community of practice!

(4) I want to thank you all for supporting us, the Personal Kanban ideas, and each other over the last 12 months. Your stories have never ceased to inspire Tonianne and myself to write more, create more, and get through life's challenges.

I look forward to working with you all in 2012.

Jim

--
Jim Benson
Collaborative Management

Modus Cooperandi: Performance Through Collaboration 

Personal Kanban: Personal organization your brain will actually like

Author: Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life 

My Evolving Web Blog  | Follow me on Twitter 

Skype: ourfounder
Phone US +1.206.383.6088
Add Me on Linked In

[DACox]

Adam,

I wonder what the scale (time span) is of items on your board? Are they big projects or small chunks (aka inch-pebbles)? Let's say small is two hours or less. And big would be 6 hours or more. My feeling is that with smaller chunks, it would be easier to get them done prior to interruption. The ultimate anti-interruption would be something like Pomodoro technique.

I resonate with Jurgen Appello's idea of networked Kanban (http://www.noop.nl/2011/11/networked-kanban.html), though it occurs to me that it could become an administrative nightmare. Especially for an individual

That said, one of the things I feel I struggle with is getting the effective level of abstraction. And how to relate and maintain higher level views (here's my backlog, here's the projects I'm working on) with lower level views (here's my goals for the week, here's what I'm working on today).

I think that we all need to adopt these tools to fit our particular cognitive styles and preferences as well as work contexts. I'd certainly love to see more reflection on that.

Best,
Don Cox

-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Personal Kanban Community of Practice group. To post to this group, send email to persona...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to personalkanba...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/personalkanban?hl=en

[Jim Benson]

Hi Dan,

What I believe resonates with you about Jurgen's post is that individual work bounces back and forth from mundanely predictable to chaos ... and from individually to group focused. Further we often have great insight into work at or near "our station" and lose track of it as it moves away.

Jurgen"s post grew out of a conversation I had with Al Shalloway in Belgium a week before his birds of a feather talk. I described a network based kanban system I was working to create for a very complex workflow with literally thousands of loosely coupled participants.

That system holds the crux of your problem. Task sizing on a kanban is highly contextual. Therefore, my rule is to let context guide and frequently check-in to make sure you understand your context.

For example, small projects with known tasks can be tracked as a project under normal conditions. So "clean kitchen" on a normal, healthy, WIP limited day is fine.

But if there is a lot going on and that 90 minutes to clean the kitchen  can't be easily spared, then WiP lmting to the task level is not only appropriate, but encouraged. You can run in and load and start the dishwasher in 15 minutes and get back to whatever else is pressing.

Tonianne and I have tickets of wildly varying granularity on our boards.

Jim

[DACox]

Jim,

Thanks for the reply.

Can you say more about habit, practices, and behaviours around how you let context guide, frequently check-in, and change task size?

For example in your example, do you leave the ticket with "Clean the kitchen" in Ready and make a new one for the dishwasher that you put in Doing and then Done? I'd appreciate if you could say more about how this plays out on the board.

Is a "normal, healthy, WIP limited day" one that has no interruptions or is there some other defining characteristic?

How wide is the variation of granularity on your boards? Does that variation stay even when the tickets move into the doing column?

Thanks again.

Best,
Don