Personal Kanban - Lessons Learned

“And now we're back
Where we started
Here we go round again
Day after day
I get up and I say
I better do it again”
Back Where We Started ~ The Kinks

It’s been seven months since I began using Personal Kanban. Initially I wanted to learn more about Kanban and also come up with a better way to cope with the massive amount of things I had waiting for me to do. I’ve definitely learned more about Kanban and my ability to manage the work I have to do in a much healthier way than I had before. Most of all, there were learnings that caught me by surprise.

• Personal Kanban helped me get more clarity on what my workflow process actually is. It isn’t easy to be non-judgmental (with yourself) about this, but I believe that doing so is a very important part of understanding and improving.
• Personal Kanban helped me come to the understanding that despite the pressure and stress I put on myself, there is almost nothing I have on my plate that I don’t actually really want to do. The hard part seems to be to keep that in mind all the time. It is something I still need more work on, but I do feel extremely fortunate in that respect.
• Personal Kanban has allowed me to become more aware of the “waste” in my “system”. This has allowed me to make a conscious choice about what waste should remain and what should go. Some of the waste is an important part of my workflow and creative process.
• I learned that one of they keys in my own management of work I have to do is to maintain a physical board with a limited amount of space in which to capture work to be done. I need to be able to see everything at once for it to be workable.

And now, seven months down the road, I am on the road to recreating the same mess in KanbanPad that I used to have in Things. Right now I have:

• 15 items in my Backlog Queue
• 16 items in my Someday Queue
• 17 items in my On Deck Queue
• 17 items in my Today Queue
• 4 items in my Doing Queue

The biggest benefit of the last few months by far, is that I have become more aware of how I work and I am more aware of what I need to do to correct it.

When you begin studying certain forms of meditation you learn to count your breath. When thoughts arise you are to observe them, but not engage them. You just let them move on without getting caught up with them. If you do find that you are caught up, once you realize it, you let go and then refocus on your breath and start counting again. Not easy in the beginning, but the more you do it, the less difficult it becomes. My expectation is that working with Personal Kanban (or whatever approach is taken to getting work done) is similar. There are have periods where things go well and, and some, not so much. The trick is just to go back to the starting point and do it all again.

Time to make the donuts…

Personal Kanban - App Review Update: LeanKit and Kanban Pad

I mentioned before that I was happy enough with LeanKit that after I had adapted to using it, that I was not going to keep testing out different apps for Personal Kanban.


What can I say...

I was pretty happy with LeanKit from a Personal Kanban standpoint. When I checked it against my original criteria a few weeks ago, it only hit 50% of my original requirements:

1. Must be available on laptop, iPhone and iPad (PASS)
2. Must be as close to my physical board as possible (meaning must allow for swim lanes) (PASS)
3. Must have some capacity for dealing with recurring tasks (FAIL)
4. Must be available online and offline with a sync capability or something as easy as capturing notes on a post it or index card (FAIL)

But that was better than none, and it let me do some stuff I felt was really important:

1. Set up my swim lanes just like I had them on the wall.
2. Define the work state columns however I wanted.
3. Establish whatever WIP limits I wanted and warn me when I tried to exceed them.
4. It let me color code the cards based on work type.

I am also part of a volunteer group that had made a decision to use it and we were able to get full access to the tool which opened up some additional functionality. Being able to attach files to card and assign them to multiple individuals is something I found very helpful when using it with a team.

And then.....

I went to a meeting. I sat next to someone way smarter to me. I glanced at his screen and saw that he was using a Kanban app. Since he is smarter than me, and had come to a meeting with just an iPad (an obvious indicator of superior intellect and travel skill), and his screen was filled with a lot of really bright colors, it became obvious to me that this was an app worthy of further investigation. And this is how I was introduced to Kanban Pad.

When I compare this Kanban Pad against my original criteria:

1. Must be available on laptop, iPhone and iPad (PASS-ish)
2. Must be as close to my physical board as possible (meaning must allow for swim lanes) (PASS)
3. Must have some capacity for dealing with recurring tasks (FAIL, but)
4. Must be available online and offline with a sync capability or something as easy as capturing notes on a post it or index card (FAIL)

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8011/7356295658_6c8acbc520_o.jpg

The app works great on an iPad or in a web browser. It's easy to drag cards from one column to another.  And technically, Kanban Pad works on an iPhone as well. They do have a version sized for the small screen. Unfortunately, in the smaller screen, you can only view one column at a time. Trying to move tasks between columns in this format  left me feeling like I was wearing boxing gloves while carrying a small child, a folding chair and trying to eat an ice cream cone at the same time.

Kanban Pad does allow for customizable, swim lanes, but not in exactly the same way that you'd set them up on a physical board. It allows you to establish multiple columns and within each column the Type setting allows you to establish Queue, In Progress or Queue and In Progress workflows. By using Queue and In Progress and editing the labels, I found an easy solution to my recurring task issue. 


Another great feature is that the Product Backlog and Backlog of work that has moved past Accepted (meaning it no longer needs to be seen), can be maintained off the main task board. 

Kanban Pad also allows you to establish WIP limits for your queues and it warns you fairly incessantly about your flagrant violation of them should you choose to venture off the path. (I ended up not using this feature because my frustration over the warnings became more significant than my desire to maintain WIP limits.  

The app includes a feature where you can customize colored tags which can be applied to each task so that you can tell what type of work you are looking at.

There are a number of additional features that Kanban Pad offers, but those are the ones that have proven to be most valuable to me from a Personal Kanban perspective. 

By way of a final verdict/opinion on the app, I offer this... I've been using Kanban Pad for about 6-8 weeks now. It has become my primary tool for managing my  work using Personal Kanban. After all my efforts at trying to find a way to use Things as a tool for Personal Kanban, I've all but stopped using Things and only open it (or Reminders) now when I have to capture something that I will add to my task board later. 

A Tip for Embracing Dysfunction

One thing I have noticed about my use of Kanban Pad is that I've begun using the screen on which I am looking at the work as my way of limiting WIP. If there is so much on the board that I have to scroll up and down to see all the work, then there is too much on the board. This means that some tasks have to be A) Cleared on the right so I can keep moving items over B) That I've got to remove some work from the active columns into the Product Backlog (which is not visible form the main board) or C) I need to consolidate and/or delete some items. This may not be the "right way" to do it, but at the moment, it is working pretty well for me, so I am okay with that. 

Track Your Happiness helped me gain a better understand of my unique issues with determining "value", but, in general, I think happiness is not really my bag... or at least, not the driving force behind my understanding of "value". While working on this project I have been talking with a lot of people who do evaluate things that way. They see the things they have an opportunity to do as either "things which make me happy" or "things which do not make me happy". So, the prioritization happens based on the degree of expected happiness or degree of expected unhappiness.

IMHO think the true goal is to find a way to uncover the aspect of whatever you are doing that can make you happy. It sounds simple, but it requires effort and discipline... it is far easier to just give in and wallow. Personal Kanban is supposed to help you understand your work better, and it has, but my increased awareness of how I perceive the work I have to do may be the most valuable thing I've picked up doing this.  

An even though using TrackYourHappiness.org was interesting, it never felt (to me) like it was measuring the right stuff. Happiness seemed close, but not quite close enough.

After some discussion with Boz, I began rating everything I do at 3 different points:

A) How I felt doing it (-3 to +3)

B) How I felt finishing it (-3 to +3)

C) Overall mirth from having it done (-3 to +3)

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/87/263228000_9513c97026_o.jpg

One of the things I realized in tracking the work I was doing was that for some items, the simple act of finishing it off can be as valuable as getting some newer items done.  This is especially true for the ones that have been sitting on the Kanban board smirking at you and taunting you in all their undone glory. The longer they sit the more mental and emotional weight they take on.  

It is probably also important to note that how progress is tracked has a toll as well. Capturing a 3 point ranking as I complete each task was okay on a post it - until I needed to extract the data electronically so I could analyze it. I was still struggling with letting go of Things and since I knew there was a way to extract the data I used that as my excuse to formally legitimize my inability to give up my favorite app. Unfortunately, my Coach asked me to try and see if I could work out how to use it to do Personal Kanban in a manner that was somewhat similar to what I had on my physical board.

It took a few tries, but I did manage to do get set up to do Personal Kanban in Things by grouping items into categories named after backlog columns.  As I completed each task, before I checked the box, I would assign it a 3-digit number based on the rating listed above. But, I don't think I ever moved anything into

Doing... they just went from not done, to done. 

After a few weeks Boz and I reviewed the results and for the most part, the information they offered were things that were already been apparent. Going through this process did have one very significant  result though. It caused me to pay more attention to how I felt about each thing I was doing while I was doing it and when I was finished doing it. I became more present with what I was doing and more aware of the impact it was having - which may be a significant contributor to the perception of value.

Using Things as a way to track all this also made me keenly aware of two additional points:

1. Trying to use Things to do Personal Kanban is kinda dumb

2. It was time to climb out of the value rabbit hole

My quest to understand the "value" of what I was doing had no clear answer save for the understanding that value can be a very subjective thing. I also had begun to feel like maybe the question was not, am I doing things that are not valuable, or how do I reduce the waste created by non-value adding activities, but how do I balance all the valuable things I want to work on. So, in many ways I was back to where I started.

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3529/3229050640_ed5393886a_o.jpg

I have lots to do.
I want/need to do it all.
I have limited time.
I need a way to decide what to do first - always

One key difference though is that as I continue to work through this, I am becoming more aware of how I am working and why. There are things in the system which are (technically) waste. Maybe those things needs to be there to keep the rest of the system in balance.

{Insert Climactic Ending Here}

If we were machines, perhaps all waste would be bad. Waste dampens productivity. But, we are not machines and maybe those dampeners are part of how we maintain our own productive flow. In examining the waste in my Personal Kanban practice, I have observed that it exists and that the effort required to eliminate that waste may not be worth the squeeze.

Personal Kanban Weeks 10-12

The Heart of Darkness

Kanban. (expletive) Still only in Kanban. Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the GTD…

Towards the end of my experiment with Kanban-for-1 I was feeling like I had lost my way. I was still carrying too much work to be able to make use of Kanban-for-1, but my attempts at using it had taught me a number of useful things.

1. Whatever I use, it needs to be completely portable.
2. Whatever I use needs to be available to me whether I am online or off.
3. Whatever I use needs to be simple enough that the act of using it does not become a time/productivity suck. The tool can’t be in my way.
4. I really like working with a physical board and would like something as close to that as possible.
5. When I am home, and using the physical board on the wall, the process works quite well for me.

I toyed with the idea of trying to get a piece of plastic that I could use as a physical board and that I could roll up and carry with me.  But I’m guessing that the person in seat 21A (who is probably still a bit irked about losing the battle for the armrest) is not going to take kindly to me unrolling my big Kanban board to work on it mid flight.

The Horror, The Horror

I did attempt to use my Kanban journal. This is the book I make notes in each week on how things are going. I carry it with me each time I go on the road, so it seems like a great fit. Exiting Kanban-for -1, I re-created all my post its and created a PK Board in my notebook that was just like the one on my wall. It worked great until I actually placed the post-its in the book. I was right back to the Kanban-for-1 issue.

Drowning in a bunch of stuff I could not really see clearly. Just like with Kanban-for-1, if I had to move a task, first I had to dig through the piles of tasks to figure out where it was.

Disclaimer: I should point out that if you are reading this hoping to get to a point where I realize I’m just carrying way too many tasks… you might want to get a sandwich… it’s gonna be a while.

I decided to take a look at the Personal Kanban apps again. My requirements were the same:

1. Must be available on laptop, iPhone and iPad.
2. Must be as close to my physical board as possible (meaning must allow for swim lanes).
3. Must have some capacity for dealing with recurring tasks.
4. Must be available online and offline with a sync capability or something as easy as capturing notes on a post it or index card.

Basically I’m looking for Things, but Kanban style (cough cough Cultured Code cough cough).
Since I’ve started writing this blog people have been kind enough to send in a number of recommendations. Trello seems to be very popular. I’ve also received suggestions that I use Evernote for Kanban. I’d love to be able to do that, but I’ve not yet found a tool that would allow me to do so in as effortless a manner as I am looking for. Basically, if using the tool is more work than pulling an index card or a post it out of my pocket and capturing the item/updating the item while I am in an elevator, walking down the street, or sitting on a plane, it’s too much work.

Unfortunately, none of the tools I was able to find met all my requirements. However, after looking over the options, I decided o give Leankit a try. My reasons for choosing it were not entirely scientific, but I’m human…

Leankit allowed me to do the following:

1. Set up my swim lanes just like I had them on the wall.
2. Define the work state columns however I wanted.
3. Establish whatever WIP limits I wanted and warn me when I tried to exceed them.
4. It let me color code the cards based on work type.

The last point may seem trivial, but to me, it is very significant and one of the primary reasons that I have so much trouble with personal Kanban applications. The value of my physical board is that I can put everything I had to do up there at once. I can look at it all at once. It is a really big information radiator. For me, it’s a billboard telling me what is going on with the things I feel I need to do. No matter how awesome the software is, or how big my monitor is, there doesn’t seem to be a way to replicate the big thing on the wall + tactile interaction thing.

While my preference for a physical board is clearly established, there is no way that my physical board and my Martin travel guitar are going to fit in the overhead, so I need me some app-age.

"Never get out of the boat... Unless you were goin all the way."
(Capt. Willard)

Leankit

I used Leankit for about a month during this project. As far as Personal Kanban apps go, it is my weapon of choice. I’ve not tested out the paid version, which includes some extra features and more detailed analytics, but I found the free version to be very helpful in tracking my work on the road. My favorite aspect of the application was the customization. I really liked that I could set up my board in Leankit to mirror the one I have at home. In practicing any work habit, I believe the first step should always be the physical practice. If it moves to an electronic tool, then it is important to select a tool that allows you to mirror your physical behavior. Leankit offered me the most freedom there.

It even allowed me to set up multiple backlogs so that I could mirror how Things had worked for me. While I wasn’t able to figure out how to get recurring tasks going, I was able to create a ReUsable backlog so that each night I could move the recurring Daily items back into that backlog if I wanted. I didn’t actually end up doing that, but it somehow eased my mind to know that I could.

It also allows you to set due dates, mark work as blocked and it has an icon system for type of work.
So, Leankit allowed me to replicate my physical board on the web. It also has an iPhone application which took a little time to get the hang of, but which allowed me to update items as long as I could get online. With respect to my requirements:

1. Must be available on laptop, iPhone and iPad (PASS)
2. Must be as close to my physical board as possible (meaning must allow for swim lanes) (PASS)
3. Must have some capacity for dealing with recurring tasks (FAIL)
4. Must be available online and offline with a sync capability or something as easy as capturing notes on a post it or index card (FAIL)

From a mobility standpoint, with the exception of offline sync, the tool works quite well. It allows me to access my work, update it, enter new items, etc. You can even set it up to allow you to access multiple accounts. On my iPhone I have Leankit set up to access my personal account under one email address and another one I use for Scrum Alliance volunteer work.

The fact that Leankit did not meet all my requirements is not significant for me. None of the applications I looked at were able to meet all of them. From a customization, portability and usability standpoint, I am a big fan of Leankit.

You can't go out into space with fractions.

Initially I had planned to keep testing different applications. What I discovered after a few weeks was that while I want to the portability, the loss of big information radiator-ness was crippling. This was something I decided needed further research, but not so much in the way of testing additional apps. What I felt I needed a better handle on was why I wanted the apps and what I was actually doing with them. I do expect to go back and test out some additional apps – I really want to take a look at Trello because a lot of people have mentioned to me that they use it. But, after a few weeks with Leankit I decided to bail on trying new software for a while because it was time to start working with a Personal Kanban coach. Coverage of that will begin in the next blog post.

Personal Kanban Week 6

What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tunafish?

By week 6 I felt like I had begun to get the hang of a basic working practice of doing Personal Kanban using a physical board. I definitely still had room for improvement, but I felt ready to start on the next phase of this experiment  - tracking the work using an electronic board. Another reason I wanted to begin this phase was that I was about to begin traveling and teaching again.

The questions I initially had about this were:

1. Could I maintain the working habits I had established using an electronic board?
2. Could I find a tool that was as easy for me to use as a physical board?
3. Could I fit all the work I was carrying on to the physical board?
4. Could I find a tool that would allow me to work in an offline mode and have any changes I made sync up when I went back online?

There were a number of concerns I had about each of these questions.

Maintaining Working Habits

When I am teaching Scrum classes or coaching I always advocate starting out with a physical practice of working with a board on the wall whenever possible. There are two primary reasons for this.

The first is that when people are adopting an Agile practice, doing the work with physical tools allows the practitioners to develop their own working version of Scrum. Once they have established their practice, they gain clarity on what they need a tool to do for them. If they begin with an electronic tool, they learn to work the way the tool works. Each of the tools offers it’s own take on Agile and this may, or may not work to the benefit of the practitioner, but more often than not I’ve seen people rely on the tool to drive their habits (or provide them with an excuse for not applying some aspect of a practice.)

The second reason is that while it may not seem like a big deal, there is a psychological boost that comes from walking up to a board and moving a card into the Done column. It’s not a huge boost, but it is a good feeling to physically do that. If you can do it multiple times a day, there is an increased sense of accomplishment and this helps drive the practice. While I do think there is also a boost from doing the same in electronic form, I have not personally found that to be as positive an experience.

Ease of Use

Since I was still in the beginning stages of training myself to work this way, I wanted to make sure I would be able to find a tool that would allow me to maintain the good habits I was developing, while allowing me to continue to experiment. I also wanted to make sure that the process of creating a task, or moving a task would be as simple/easy as writing something down on a post it and moving it across a physical board. My assumption was that if the tool proved to be more complicated to use than a physical board, I would be less likely to maintain or improve on the habits I was developing. Anytime using software becomes more difficult to use than paper it makes work harder. That would obviously work against my goal for this entire project.

Fitting it All In

When I made the decision to try to include everything I do on the board my board became pretty crowded. I even had to switch to smaller post its in order to be able to fit everything. My goal was to find a tool that would allow me to keep all the work in one place, but it also had to be stored in a way that was big and visible enough for me to be able to see everything all at once.

Off the Grid

This was the biggest challenge for me. I have spent the last two + years teaching myself how to stop letting things slip through the cracks by relying on Things and Evernote. Both of these tools allow me to work on multiple devices and then have changes sync up when I reconnect. Basically, whenever I think of something I need to do, or encounter information I expect to need later, my goal is to get that thing out of my head and into something more responsible than me as quickly as possible. I have too much to do and sometimes I forget stuff. I’m also often easily distracted by the “OH LOOK A SQUIRREL!” factor, and I get ideas and find information in odd places when I am not connected. In working this way I have definitely developed a habit of putting more in Things than I can do, but this has helped me keep things from completely slipping through the cracks. Several times a day I review the list of items I have placed in the Today section of Things to clean it up. I do end up moving deadlines on tasks quite a bit, but having them there at least helps remind me that they are there and probably should be dealt with at some point. I also periodically review the items that have moved out of Today into Someday and do my best to cull the herd.

Evernote is like the junk drawer for my brain. It allows me the freedom to fully engage my inner Bill Blazejowski. All the ideas, notes, pictures of weird things that are momentarily important to me for some unknown reason, the books I want to read, and voice notes from “Chuck to remind Bill to SHUT UP!” go in there. There’s a good chance many of those things will get no further than being stuck in Evernote and left to electronically wither… but I do feel more at ease knowing that I have them... just in case.

The problem is, that Personal Kanban seems to be largely focused on reducing the amount of cultter (stuff I’m trying to work on) and moving to an electronic version may make it tough to continue embracing my inner digital hoarder. Six weeks in, I’ve still not been able to break from using Things every day just to capture stuff that may need to be added to the backlog. It may be dysfunctional, but my addiction to storing everything in a place more reliable than my own head is something I’ve been working on developing for a long time. It is definitely more appealing to me than going back to forgetting things I need to do. I was not sure how much of that I’d be able to let go of, or if doing so was even necessary.

So one of my goals for Sprint 6 was to select a tool and start testing. The first tool I decided to try was Kanban For 1. I’ll be posting about that beginning next week.