Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Personal Kanban

I had a late evening tea with Jim Benson in an upmarket tea house on Seattle’s Ballard Ave last week. We caught up on a bunch of stuff. We’ve met only twice since I left Modus Cooperandi in September last year. Once we brushed all the personal and business catch up aside, we got to talking about applying the Kanban approach to personal work. I’d been thinking a lot about how it might work since I saw some folks like Jon Miller who’s been blogging about his experiences. Here’s his eighth day posting. I’ve also been attending a few Seattle socialite parties lately and finding myself having to explain what my new manuscript is about. So I start with the whole deal about limiting your work in progress and only starting something new when you finish something. And perhaps I talk a little about classes of service and cost of delay (or impact of delivery time). I put the whole thing in very plain language. Immediately, people start to tell me about their own lives and work habits and how their work-in-progress is out of control. They’d start to think out loud about how limiting their WIP would change their lives and how they interact with clients and business partners. In another example, one friend I met in Atlanta 2 weeks ago, told me she had at least 20 activities on-going at work. She’s a product manager for a wireless telcom firm. So over dinner we talked about Kanban principles to see if they might help her. It was interesting how her stories echoed examples we’ve seen in corporate situations. Stories like, “I had to add that one extra task because it is a $1 million sales opportunity that we will lose if we don’t design and add the feature by end of July!” Ah ha! An request with a fixed delivery date that you are treating as higher priority (and effectively giving it a different class of service.)

So Personal Kanban has been on my mind!

Jim started to tell me about his own thoughts and it turned out that he’s been using Kanban a lot for his now 1 person Modus Cooperandi running from the attic of his townhome in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood. As we talked it through it became apparent that we drawn the same conclusions.

Personal Kanban is different! And at the same time it is the same!

Personal Kanban is different because the way an individual behaves and how the rules (or policies) or the kanban system apply to that individual are different from how the rules (or policies) of a team kanban system apply to an individual.

Personal Kanban is the same because the overall kanban system will look and work similar to that of a team. Personal Kanban is where an individual emulates the behavior of a team. Modus Cooperandi (a business) behaves like a team, even though it is powered by only one individual.

I encouraged Jim to write his thoughts down and he has. His 12 part blog series on Personal Kanban is appearing now. Part 1 - Reflections on Personal Kanban and Part 2 - Issues that Make Personal Kanban Different are already online. Follow him on Twitter @ourfounder for alerts to the future articles in the series.

Would you like to see a track on Personal Kanban at Lean Software & Systems 2010 conference? Leave a comment. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management, Jim+Benson, Jon+Miller