Personal Kanban

At work, our development cycle is being converted to a Kanban system.  I read a book, cleverly titled Kanban, about the process and it was really good.  I have been thinking of bringing Kanban home and then I googled “Personal Kanban” and low and behold there is already a book on it.
http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/personal-kanban-the-book/

The idea of Kanban can be summed up best in two ideas that are intended to eliminate wasted time:

  1. Make the work visible. – If you always know what is next, you don’t waste time wondering what to do next or forget and do something not yet needed.
  2. Limit the Work in progress – By not jumping from item to item, you have less wasted time.

So it is basically like a “honey-do” list, but where you limit the amount of items you can actually be working on at one time.

The idea is to have columns similar to this:

List of Work Prepared work Work in progress (WIP) Complete
Clean garage Grease hinges Write Wix fragment app Fix sink
Fix paint in archway Repair siding
Add shelves to garage Get new tires
Help brother with his website Fix blog

So I am going to try this at home for a while. I may even buy the book. I did put it on my amazon wish list.

2 Comments

  1. Jim Benson says:

    Thank you Jared, it's been interesting to see the number of teams that have started using kanban because team members were using Personal Kanban ... and vice versa. It does seem to naturally flow from team work to personal work.

    The book does go pretty deep into how Personal Kanban works, and thanks so much for mentioning it in the post.

    But there's also this page with a lot of intro info right on the PK site:

    http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/personal-kanban-101/

    Thanks again for the post, and let Tonianne or me know how its going for you (and your team) and if you have any questions.

    Jim

    • Rhyous says:

      Thanks for the comment.

      My team was the one of two pilot teams, and we have a digital read-only Kanban board (a web app displayed on a 50" TV) that is sort of the flagship for Kanban at work. We have a great board. I will try to send you a screen shot. My team really likes it. We update TFS and the Kanban, makes our work visible. I keep telling them they need to put the Kanban board on SourceForge or something so others could use it and improve it.

      I am glad I found your site, I just couldn't shake the idea of bringing the Kanban system to my home life.

Leave a Reply

How to post code in comments?