Agile@Home :
It’s probably time I gave a brief explanation about Kanban mainly, and how it translates to an effective family communication system that helps us get things done .
It’s probably time I gave a brief explanation about Kanban mainly, and how it translates to an effective family communication system that helps us get things done .
I’ll keep it short, OK?
Kanban is a Lean manufacturing
tool, aiming to lower costs in high production environments.
"Kan-Ban" is Japanese for signal card, that had all the product
information written on it, and what is needed to be done after production. A
Kanban system contains a set of cards allocated to each station in the
manufacturing line.
The Kanban System was developed few decades ago by Mr.
Taiichi Ohno, a vice president in
Toyota, to achieve his goals of reducing costs, while retaining high
quality in the manufacturing line. The system is still used today by industrial
factories all over the world, and has been widely adopted by the software
development industry. Today, more and more uses are being found for Kanban -
self management , time management, and GTD (Getting Things Done).
See? I promised it would be short.
Kanban principles (And a bit of Scrum) and how they translate to the Agile Kids system:
Visualize your Needs.
What about my office, am I
managing my tasks well?
Just write it down, preferably on sticky notes, so you can see them. Visualization is
valuable, and it helps get things done.
Imagine you are a work manager of a chair factory. If you
were making a chair, you would write down the materials and tasks you need -
measure, saw, glue, and so on. You want chairs of different sizes, and
different colors... These are all tasks.
Some tasks consist of smaller tasks, while other tasks
depend on tasks that come before them. So you need to list them all. Of course,
you can list down all the tasks you want to complete for your family or your
office.
This is our wish list, or ‘backlog’.
Some of the tasks we list are
urgent, some are wishful thinking, and others are tasks we’ve put off for a
long time.
We can create wish list for our
tasks in the office or for our home chores. Whatever.
Now all we need to do, is visualize.
Your basic work flow has three simple steps. ‘To do’, In progress’ and ‘Done’.
As a work manager in our chair factory,
If you were making a chair, then your workflow would look like this:
Measure → Saw → Assemble → Paint → Ship.
In your case, tasks look a little
bit different, but you still have a workflow. Of course, you mustn’t forget to prioritize your tasks!
Visualizing our tasks this way
helps us see what we need to do, and when to start working on the stuff we want
to do.
Limit your WIP (Work In
Progress)
Do one thing at a time.
Pull one tasks , complete it , and then pull the next task in line. In time, you’ll see how many tasks you can
perform at the same time, but to start off with, it’s better to complete one
task at a time, then start five, and not complete any of them.
Take the chairs factory for
example. After you set up your tasks, you try to build 100 chairs at once. You
need to assemble them, paint them and ship them. You might be able to assemble
them all, but that’s about it. All those unpainted chairs will just sit there,
a large bottleneck you’ll have to deal with later, and of course, not one is
shipped out.
But what if you would have tried
to build and ship FIVE chairs?
In the industry, when a factory starts a cycle of work but
does not finish, it is called inventory. Factories can’t sell inventory, and it
takes up room (which needs to be paid for) and kept at a specific temperature
(which needs to be paid for). In our personal life, we pay for that wasted
inventory with delays, stress and overtime, just because we try to keep up with
too many tasks. Context switching (jumping from one task to another without
completing either) is another way to get little or no value from our tasks.
Visualization helps you
identify your limits and control your workload.
Improve
Lets go back to our chair making. Remember that you need to
measure the wood, then saw it? If your saw isn’t sharp enough, then you’ll be
working twice as hard just to cut the pieces. Then you’ll work at sanding them
down, joining them, and so on. You need to stop every so often, and sharpen your
saw, before you get back to work. Or in other words, review your tasks.
identify the areas of improvement and keep on the work. then stop again ,
review your performance , change , and continue with your changed flow.
It isn’t hard to find examples
from our Family life, either. Every morning, the whole family waits by the
door while my son hunts for his shoes. Isn’t it obvious that we need to put his
shoes next to the door the night before? Of course it is. It can be about tasks
as simple as putting on shoes in the morning, and as complicated as managing
your meeting schedule in the office.
Stop, and think about your
work flow. Otherwise you’ll find yourself making the same mistakes over and
over again.
Kanban is not enough ,This is the point where scrum comes into the picture. when we use Kanban with our family , scrum and agile mindset are also part of our success.
Run your
tasks in small iterations of time (optional), it allows kids and us to scope
better. Meet
once a day ,as a family , review your progress and needs. Retrospect over what
you did and plan the next step accordingly. Talk things over with your kids;
get ideas about how to improve on your tasks. In the industry, this form of
improvement may be ‘let’s meet once a day, review the project and learn how to
do it better’ or identify the area of improvement, talk it over and perform the
change. Then, try the news setup. This is exactly the same thing at home…meet ,
talk it over. We then improve and free
some valuable time to talk over the really important stuff.
Make Process Policies
Explicit.
The same goes for our house.
Bedtime and meal times are known and understood by all. They are known
policies. Of course, policies can change - for instance, our policy is to
complete homework when the kids get back from school. But after a week, we find
out that they do a much better job when they do their homework after supper. So
the policy changes, and our kids can get their homework done faster and better
- but the policy is still stated explicitly, so that everyone knows what it is.
You can apply the same system of
policy rules to your office day - ‘leave 5 min at the end of every meeting’,
‘don’t have consecutive meetings as you won’t get there on time’ and so on.
Improving is also about being
able to set new policies, follow them and see if they work for us better.
Measure And Manage Flow.
Around the house we aren’t so
ruthless in our pursuit of efficiency, but we do expect to know what we are
doing, and see how we can improve, and free up quality time to be with our
family. For example, once you learn to put the kids’ shoes by the door each
night, you can actually relax with your kids a few more minutes at the
breakfast table each morning. Isn’t that better than waiting for them by the
door while they hunt for their shoes?
In the office I also want to be
more efficient, so I can free up time to pay attention to my customers. Just as
an example, say I use the printer a lot - but it is located two floors up.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient to change the printer’s place, or buy a new one
for me, instead of running up and down two flights of stairs each time I
printed something out? Once you free up that valuable time, you can use it for
more productive things. and at the same time speed up your flow of delivery to
your customers.
To Sum Up:
Just follow some simple rules:
1.
Visualize
a.
Your tasks: Know what you need to
do and make a list
b.
Visualize your workflow: Place it
on a board
2.
Do one thing at a time. Don’t take
on more than you can handle.
3.
Follow and inspect your progress
and outcome to improve. Talk it over, every day.
4.
Remember Scrum. Meet once a day
for a family gathering, retrospect and plan your week.
5.
Understand your limits and set
your relevant policies and rules.
6.
Measure and manage your flow
Resources:
Toyota Production System: Beyond
Large-scale Production, Taiichi Ohno
