One of the best ways to learn and start implementing Kanban if it does indeed have all these fantastic benefits is to do it on a personal level first.
We basically create different projects, and those projects, aren’t atomized until the last possible minute. So we keep things in an aggregated form as long as we possibly can, which is a fancy way of saying that we procrastinate. But this is a good type of procrastination.
The other day I wrote and basically said; “You can put things off until the last responsible minute“, which means that you’re waiting until you have to get it done, which seems like procrastination, but what it actually is, is you’re not doing something too soon.
So, lots of times we will start a task before we need to, and then as we’re doing the task, more information or more knowledge will come to us and we will figure out “Oh! I should have done it a different way!” Then we end up having waste in the work that we’ve just done, because we started the work too soon.
On the other hand, there’s the other type of procrastination which is the “I’m going to ignore it, until it becomes a problem.” That’s not good. Nobody wants to do that.
If you did not open the e-book, maybe this will entice you enough:
Any productive group that is inside an object that isn’t part of that object is basically a cancer. So I’ve seen extremely productive, thoughtful, wonderful groups that act contrary to the needs of their organization, because of their disenfranchisement from that organization.- Jim Benson
Personal Kanban: personalkanban.com
Kanban just seems too simple to be that effective, or is that the beauty of it? Listen to Jim Benson discuss the intricacies of not only Personal Kanban but how Kanban can be used effectively within industry. Jim was seldom lost for words as you will see and his passion of the subject is obvious.
Jim Benson incorporates his background in cognitive psychology, government, and management to build community through policy and technology. His company, Modus Cooperandi, helps organizations change through the application of Lean principles, Agile methodologies, and social media. He is also the developer of the productivity tool Personal Kanban, an adaptation of industrial kanban which helps individuals and small teams actualize. His book on Personal Kanban, which applies Lean thinking to daily living, will be out in Spring 2010.
Jim says, “Personal kanban is an idea that arose from necessity. I began a personal kanban prior to starting Modus Cooperandi, but it didn’t translate as cleanly from the programming and industrial world as I would have liked. It wasn’t until one day when Corey Ladas and I sat down and really started to talk about the differences between industrial kanban and personal kanban that things really started to gel.”