Personal Kanban

2009-07-15 Notes from orcmid's and band's experiences with Jim Benson's |"Personal Kanban" practices.

Bill's first reflection after reading post #1: I so need this practice.

Orcmid's reflection: I am so confronted by this that I have to just lead myself through it. Here is some structure. -- orcmid 16:36, 28 July 2009 (EDT)

= Personal Kanban: The Series =

Jim Benson is producing a Personal Kanban series on his Evolving Web blog. Here are the posts, comments, and allied materials.

1. Reflections on Personal Kanban: A Series
This initial announcement of the series is updated with links to the subsequent posts as they appear. There is a rough list of the intended future posts that is amended as the material unfolds (using the tools in the intended spirit of continuous improvement -- orcmid 16:36, 28 July 2009 (EDT)).

The introduction raises four facets to be developed further:


 * 1) The nature and characteristic difficulties of kanban as a personal instrument
 * 2) What kanban are and how they are used
 * 3) The principles of kanban process
 * 4) Links to further resources

Kanban as Personal Instrument
David Anderson suggests that personal kanban is a big deal because personal tasks are inherently more complex than team tasks. Jim Benson says he had been using personal kanbans for a while without difficulty, conceding that they are useful though not especially easy to implement. Out of that conversation, Jim began blogging what he sees about personal kanban.

What Are Kanban

 * I use "kanban" as a collective noun, although the work is Japanese and I don't know whether there is a separate plural form or not, nor do I know if it would be needed here, where the term is used for practices. -- orcmid 17:38, 28 July 2009 (EDT)


 * 1) First, a kanban is a physical object, a board with compartments on which cards can be placed and moved.  The physicality of the kanban representation is important.  There are many ways to set up a physical kanban.  A wall that accepts post-it notes, a cork board that uses recipe cards and push-pins, etc.  The physicality and convenient location -- readiness to hand -- are important.
 * 2) Secondly, a kanban supports visualization of and tracking of work in progress.  The compartments and the cards in the compartments represent the current state of that work.
 * 3) Third, there is a kanban process for assessing and diagnosing the work.  One can see what is going well and what is not and where progress is delayed.  Delays are referred to as waste.  (I've heard the Japanese term "muda" used to refer to this waste. -- orcmid 17:38, 28 July 2009 (EDT))  The goal of the kanban process is to be able to do as much work and remove as much waste as possible.  This has an industrial production-control flavor to it and we need to keep in mind that this is a process correction-and-optimization technique, with a physical structure that invites attention to that.
 * 4) Fourth, and finally, it seems that Kanban is not going to indicate which work is important or beneficial.  That appears to depend on other external factors.  The determination of value and worth of work, and related urgency, appear to be external factors.  I can also see how this might be a challenge for personal kanban, because of priority issues and the different forces at play in solo and personal undertakings. -- orcmid 17:38, 28 July 2009 (EDT)

Benson makes a nice statement about what the goal of using a personal kanban should be: "Your goal with personal kanban is not to merely have a better to-do list. It is to understand the work you have, the number of tasks you have, how you schedule, and how likely you are to make good on your promises. You will do this by visualizing your tasks, your flow of work, and the differences in types of projects you take on."

Kanban Principles
The different aspects of kanban are often collapsed in a discussion of principles and practices. Benson warns that kanban should not be taken rigidly. (I suppose it is appropriate to say that relying on kanban is an invitation to agility. -- orcmid 18:04, 28 July 2009 (EDT))


 * Karl Scotland's "Kanban, Flow and Cadence" blog post is recommended as a primer. This will provide important kanban-related nomenclature, including Work in Progress (WiP), swim lanes, flow and cadence. Bill's  takeaways from KS include: (1) The important element that defines Kanban is the concept of limits: Queue limits and Work-in-progress (WIP) limits. (2) Queue limits prevent premature prioritization: work that just sits in the queue isn't really needed yet. WIP limits keep multitasking to a minimum. Multitasking slows down production. -- Bill 16:11, 31 July 2009, (CDT)


 * Visibility is an important quality that a kanban supports. It seems to me that if the desired visibility is not achieved, one needs to review the setup of the kanban and also how it is being used -- orcmid 18:04, 28 July 2009 (EDT).  The money quote from Benson: "By making work explicit, we are able to understand where value is created, where waste is hiding, and how we function."


 * Work in Progress (WiP) is what the kanban helps us manage. Its visualization helps us limit and manage the work.  There are some interesting observations concerning how we can be weighted down by the work we take on.