Projects At Work Podcast Interview with Don Kim on his Personal Kanban Practice

My Projects at Work Podcast Interview with +Projectation Don Kim on his Personal Kanban practice can be found here:
http://www.projectsatwork.com/blog/Dave-Prior/6737/

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 - Track Your Happiness

When my efforts to employ Personal Kanban reached a point where I felt I had gone as far as I could on my own, I decided it would be a good idea to find a coach who could hopefully help me see things more objectively, challenge me on the assumptions I was not conscious of and, in general, find a way to become more disciplined in my approach. (The expectation was that more discipline would result in greater productivity.)

Brian Bozzuto, an Agile Coach from BigVisible was kind enough to agree to act as my coach. We worked together for several weeks on a number of different   I’m going to try and take these on at a time in different postings.

aspects of my approach to Personal Kanban.

When we started out discussions about my approach to Personal Kanban, one of my biggest questions was how to understand value. I was operating under the idea that anything that does not add value is waste and should be eliminated. There are things with clear value (doing work you get paid for) and things which present no obvious value (sitting on the couch watching a movie), but which have value in terms of a longer game because they are restorative in some way.  Still, I was having a hard time in my internal argument for some of the latter.

In interviewing people about their use of Personal Kanban, I encountered many who said they prioritized work solely by what makes them “happy”. A few of these people said they only do things that bring them as much joy as a child feeding ducks.

Which left me wondering… who changes the cat litter?

Boz and I talked for a while about happiness and he suggested we both sign up for Track Your Happiness. This was something he had not done before either so he also agreed to sign up for the experiment. The service is free. For a period of time the service will send you an invite (via SMS or email) to log on to their site and take a quick survey of what you are doing, and how you are feeling about it. It also provides some basic reporting so you can see what information the data has to offer about how “happy” you are.

You can adjust the frequency of the surveys. They continue until the report has enough data for it to be able to offer you some insights. After that it is supposed to begin polling you again at some point in the future.

When you take the surveys, some of them have questions which clearly make sense and some which can start to seem rather tiresome because you get asked them again and again. And there are some that are quite amusing. I often received a question asking what I was doing at that moment. The options included things like:

Working

Watching Television

Meditating

Praying

Making love with another person

Disclaimer: If you decide to try out Track Your Happiness and you feel compelled to stop and answer a survey while you are making love… I really don’t think Personal Kanban is going to solve your problems.

During the first few days I got a report that showed this:

What the service was telling me was that, based on my responses up to that point, the place where I was happiest was at the airport. Initially, this seemed horribly wrong on many levels. At the very least it seemed comedically pathetic. But, on second thought, the airport is one of the places I am usually the least stressed. I always arrive extra early, I book my flights with lots of in between time, and in the aiport I’m generally just spending time in my bubble, headphones on, working or reading. Other than my borderline obsessive fear of germs from other passengers, it’s a pretty chill place for me. (I should also point out that by this point in time I had only been using Track Your Happiness while I was on the road. So no surveys had been completed while I was at home.

As I used the service and kept reviewing the reports, I started to wonder if happiness was really a good way to frame value within the context of Personal Kanban. The “happy as a kid feeding ducks” thing weighed quite heavily into that. (I should mention that this explanation of the kid feeding a duck thing is slightly incorrect. This will be revisited in a separate post in the future.)

In the end, I have come to the conclusion that there are people who try to prioritize their work so that they only do what makes them happy. From speaking with these people, they tend to delegate or refuse to do things that do not make them happy. For me, and the way I look at the things I do, there are things that I do which clearly bring me happiness, like taking my wife out to dinner or playing a game with my daughter. And there are things I do that, initially, do not seem to have happiness to offer me.  I believe that when faced with those types of things to do, regardless of what it is, it is the frame with which we look at the thing which helps us see value in it, or not. For example, I may have a very difficult client to deal with. This may be someone I had a history of trouble communicating with. Rather than approaching it with a “this will not bring me happiness mindset”, I try to remember to approach it with “what positive thing can I derive from this encounter”. If it is a difficult client, maybe it is as simple as trying to improve my ability at being present and actively listening to them, or being diplomatic, or understanding their body language and trying to use my own to see if it can impact the situation in a favorable way.

Working through this exercise of spending a few weeks completing the surveys was incredibly helpful in developing my understanding of how I see value. The biggest epiphany for me was realizing that I actually like pretty much everything I do, in one way or another. Before going through this survey I had no awareness of that and would never have agreed with this statement. Going through the process of being questioned over and over about whether or not I would prefer to be doing something else made me keenly aware of the fact that my issue is not that I have things which make me happy and things which make me unhappy. I just have things that, in one way or another, make me happy. I enjoy doing all of them either because of the action of doing them, or the benefits they provide.

Realizing this was a significant discovery for me. Unfortunately, it brought me right back to where I started. I have many things to do. My challenge with prioritization is that I want to do them all. To one extent or another, they all provide value for me. 

So at this point, the question is not “does it provide value”, but “does something else provide more value”, or how to I balance the “valuable” things I am doing so that there is enough work, enough personal, etc.?

Personal Kanban - Weeks 13-16

Zen and The Art of Personal Kanban Maintenance

Phaedrus had Quality 

I have Value

The more I examine my approach to getting work done, the more I am aware of the inefficiency I have baked into it. The more I study about Lean, the more I become concerned about "waste". Waste is bad. Waste must be exterminated!

But what about the waste that is in there on purpose? Is that really waste?

When I teach classes, I bring a few extra workbooks for students, just in case. Most of the time, it goes in the trash at the end. So, the waste of creating extra materials for extra money is made worse by discarding it at the end of the class. Massive waste. However, that waste provided me with peace of mind that enabled me to be better focused on teaching the class. So, was it really waste?

To understand what waste is occurring and where it is taking place,  I need to understand what I am doing that does not contribute to "value". 

Value = ?

In interviewing people about Personal Kanban, several of them said they prioritize work based on what makes them happy and that they only do things with make them happy. 

Initially, this sounded great, but, 

IF (value = happy)

THEN (who changes cat litter?)

I wasn't doubting the people who told me they prioritize based on what makes them happy, I was just struggling with all the other stuff that still had to get done.  When I asked what they did with the work that did not make them happy, they said they would delegate it if it was truly necessary. This was not something I was able to envision applying to my own world though.  I have no one to delegate to.

(Minions would be nice.) Even if I did, the thought of just dumping all the not happy work on them does not seem entirely in synch with my understanding of  servant leadership.

I am clearly struggling with "value". I need some help.

Milestone...

To mark the halfway point in my 6-month experiment with Personal Kanban here is an update on where I am with it…

Original Goals - 100% achieved

1. I have learned more about how Kanban works and how it is different from Personal Kanban.

2. I have demonstrated to myself that I am capable of actually practicing some version of Personal Kanban

Having reached a point where I have solved my initial questions (above), I realized that to go any further with this I was going to need to solve a different (bigger) question:

What is value?

I also realized that if I wasn't going to go the same route as Phaedrus, I was going to need some assistance. 

I've coached teams in Agile, but I've never had a coach myself. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. I asked Brian Bozzuto if he would be kind enough to coach me and he was kind/foolish enough to agree to work with me for a few weeks. During our initial calls we talked about a number of topics which I will be posting about in the coming weeks. One of these was "value".  After discussing the prioritizing by happiness approach, it seemed that defining happiness first would be key.  Boz suggested we both try an experiment. We each signed up for Track Your Happiness http://www.trackyourhappiness.org/. Once you sign up you being receiving polls from them a few times a day trying to determine your relative level of happiness. After you complete a number of surveys they create a report that is designed to provide you with a better understanding of the things which truly bring you happiness. 

In the next post I will explain why the DFW is (sadly) my happy place.

Podcast What is Lean Startup - Interview with Devin Hedge

My Projects at Work interview with BigVisible's Devin Hedge on Lean Startup.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Podcast Interview with Stephen Denning

My Projects at Work interview with Stephen Denning, author of "The Leaders's Guide to Radical Management" and new board member of the Scrum Alliance.

Johanna Rothman's Personal Kanban Blog

Just discovered Johanna Rothman's Personal Kanban blog posts from a few weeks ago. There is a lot of great detail on the thought process and practice of using PK over a 5 day period.

Her posts start here:
http://www.jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2013/04/personal-kanban-and-iterations-day-1.html

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 9

Productivity Hangover

Ten minutes ago I was supposed to be writing this blog post. What I was doing instead was cleaning out the articles I have stored in Instapaper that have been in the queue for so long that they are no longer worth reading. This seemed really important at the time. And, I was actually-really supposed to be writing this blog post 30 minutes ago. But 30 minutes ago I was doing the stuff I meant to do 2 hours ago. And that is because 2 hours ago, I was still asleep because I stayed up until 3 AM trying to finish the things I had planned for the yesterday. This morning is all about the productivity hangover.

Yesterday, like most days, I planned too much into the day. There was no realistic way I’d be able to get it done given the fact that time is not quite as flexible as I’d like it to be and that I don’t have one of those boxes from Primer.

When a Problem Comes Along...

In working through this Personal Kanban project there is a question thing that has remained kind of an open issue for me the entire time. What about WIP? If you aren’t familiar with it, WIP stands for Work in Progress. In Kanban, the goal is to limit your work in progress in order to help maximize your throughput. Or, to put it more simply, you need to understand how much you can do at once before you start mucking things up. Once you understand that, you need to prevent yourself from taking on too much at once (and mucking things up). This also helps you understand how long it takes to get items through the system.

For the most part, the practitioners of Personal Kanban that I have spoken with have admitted that WIP is not something they pay much attention to. In speaking with them I did not dig too deeply on that topic at the time because it seemed to be non-critical. I was looking at WIP as a holdover from a more traditional approach to Kanban that had less relevance in Personal Kanban. Also, whether or not it is right or wrong, the items on my board are not sized in any way. Everything is the same, whether it is a writing a new Statement of Work, doing a load of laundry, finishing Clive Davis’s biography, or going through the legal steps of closing down a company. It is all just stuff I am trying to prioritize and do.

If you can dodge a wrench…

A few weeks ago I started working with an Agile Coach who was willing to take on the role of being my Personal Kanban Coach/Sherpa/Confessor. I am very fortunate that he was willing to take this on. The guy is brilliant and I have mad respect for him. I also can’t help but feel a bit bad for the guy. As far as being a coachee goes, I’m definitely having much with the room for optimization.

When I told him I told him I wasn’t really tracking my WIP I am pretty sure I heard him fall off his chair. The productivity guilt monster reared up and shamed me… so I recanted. I explained that I was tracking WIP …-ish. Which meant I had listed a number for WIP at the top of each of my columns and then I just wildly ignored that whenever the hell it seemed convenient…. Which was/is most of the time.

Putting the “fun” back in dysfunction

Shockingly, there are days when I can’t get everything done. Many times the reason is that I have other activities scheduled during time I would otherwise be working. I feel safe in the assumption that I am not alone in this. And yet for many of us, we somehow manage a level of delusion that permits us to plan to do work during the time we know we will be otherwise engaged. When this happens, we have these items, which we unrealistically planned, which cannot be completed on the schedule we put together. I have a master’s degree in project management and I’m deep with the Agile. I know how I am supposed to do this. I also know that how I am doing this is not healthy. I know it is not realistic. And yet it happens, over and over. I’m slowly becoming even more aware of how sharply fundamental an issue this is and how deeply and negatively it impacts my productivity. Because I do not have a clear and present awareness of my capacity and how to plan for that without exceeding it, I am always overfilling my bucket.  When I am teaching people in a work setting about how to keep from doing this, it’s easy to explain. I even have a calculator I’ve made for folks to use to help prevent them from overcommitting themselves each Sprint. But on an individual level am I really supposed to size every single thing I do and plan for doing just that and no more? That’s just not realistic.


And suddenly, just like that, I’m one of “those” students. The ones who like the ideas behind Agile, but who really need to spend some time at the Wall of Won’t.


(The teacher in me would now like to take the student in me out back now for a quick kneecapping… just for good measure.)

Sadly, I do not have a card for that on my board.

I hate when that happens.

Sherman! Time for a new Experiment!

I believe that understanding my capacity at a daily level, and planning to meet, but not exceed that capacity will allow me to complete more work each day. I believe that getting more items to a done state each day, and not leaving a lot of unfinished work on the board will have a positive impact on my ability to get work done that will further improve my productivity. I also believe that if I do not plan to do more than is possible in a day I will be better enabled to get the rest I need to be as productive as possible in future day. This is all common sense. It’s been proven over and over. We all have that voice in our heads telling us that we are special, that we can do more, that we are not bound by the normal laws of time and physics.

Yeah… not so much.

To experiment with this I am going to run two tests. First, I’m going to try the easy one … estimating ideal time for the items in my list and then also estimate my capacity. It will involve some overhead because I am going to have to do this every day, but I will try it for a week to see what happens.

The second part, which will be more challenging for me will be to try breaking my work up into pieces that are small enough to track progress on a daily basis. I’m going to run this for two weeks and then report on it.

Next week I’ll be back to the topic of software for Personal Kanban.

Podcast Interview with Factory of One author Dan Markovitz

A few weeks ago I had the chance to interview Dan Markovitz. Dan is the author of "A Factory of One", a great book on Personal Kanban. The podcast is hosted on the Projects at Work site here.