Walking the Talk

I have a confession to make that I haven’t told very many people.  I use a Kanban board to organize what I do every week. If that makes me an Agile nerd, I guess I’m guilty as charged!

At one point a few years ago I heard of some people at FedEx that weren’t working on an Agile team using a Kanban board in OneNote to organize their daily work. I thought it was wonderful that they were actually using the same Agile practices that we used at the team and organization level in their personal work. It then occurred to me that although I was espousing the use of these concepts as a leader, I was not finding ways to incorporate them in to my daily work as well. Since I like to think of myself as a “practice what you preach” kind of guy I decided to give it a try.

For most of my career I have been accustomed to carrying around a journal and making lists of things I need to accomplish. I add to the list as I work through the week and check off items as I complete them.  I had tried making to-do lists on in Outlook before, but it never was as tangible and required me to always go back to my computer to make updates. Inevitably, I would end up going back to my journal. Typically, I would make weekly lists in my journal and check off items as I completed them during the week.  At the end of the week I would copy all the unfinished items to a new page, in addition the new ones that had come up that week, and start over again. It was a good process that wasn’t really broken, but I wanted to see if a Kanban process would really be more effective.

I started by creating a Kanban Section in OneNote and added a page with the “Week of…” date as the title. I then created three equal size columns, “Ready”, “In-Progress” and “Done” using the line drawing tool. I listed all the things that I had written in my journal to accomplish that week in the “Ready” column as separate entries and used Tags to rank them by priority and level of effort. I decided it would be a good idea to WIP limit the In-Progress column, so I wrote a note above it that said, “WIP Limit: 5”. I selected five items to work on that day based on them being time sensitive or easy to knock-out and moved them to the In-Progress column. Once that was all setup, I went about my day.

At the end of each day I would come back to the Kanban Board, that was always up on my screen, and moved things from the In-Progress column to the Done column. Each morning I would take a few more items from the Ready column and move them to In-Progress. By the end of the day Wednesday something strange happened. I ran out of room in the Done column and had to rearrange some things to make it twice as big as the other two columns! I wondered if it was the Kanban process, or that I was getting my usual amount of work done and it just was more noticeable. By the end of that first week, not only had I moved every item that I had listed in the Ready column at the beginning of the week to the Done column, I had completed almost all the items that I had added during the week! I couldn’t remember the last time I got my entire list done before! I recall sitting back in my chair appropriately impressed with this new process.

The next week I copied that page to a new page, erased the Done column and started again. Week after week I was surprised at how much I was able to accomplish with my personal Kanban practice. I have made a few improvements to my Kanban pages over time. I found it useful to create a Backlog list under the Kanban with items that I wanted to do at some point, but were not ready to start on just yet. My tags now represent a cost-of-delay ranking. I move things from the backlog list to the Ready list when I can rate their relative cost-of-delay. I now use tables to make it easier to move items from one column to another. For the most part, the process has served me well. I also find it very beneficial to be able to go back and see all the things I have accomplished when it comes time to write the end of month status or close out objectives for the year.

This is one example of how Lean/Agile methods can be used even if you are a leader and not working on a formal Agile team. Let me know if you have examples to share.