Personal Kanban

One day I was approached by the HR manager. She observed what was going on at one of the team I was working with and asked if I could help out. "Sure". She described the symptoms of thrashing and reprioritization forcing constant task switching. She also described missing satisfaction of seeing her work to completion.

I got a pen and drew a small kanban on the wall of her glass cubicle. The kanban had two lanes, "big" and "small".  I adwised her – "if a stakeholder walks into through the door, ask them not to disturb you, but simply put their task in the correct priority in the in queue. Let stakeholders revise priorities at any time. But only you touches work in progress."

We wrote down the current work on posit its, agreed on WIP limits and off I went. One week later the personal kanban had spread to finance and IT support.

Being curious, I took the opportunity to ask her "what is the value you get with the changes we made?"

She replied,

So we learn a personal kanban sure add provide value. To this day it is still in use.

Once more, I learn, always give an idea a chance before disregarding it’s use 🙂

An  pdf summary can be downloaded here

2 responses on “Personal Kanban

  1. …found a scrum paper on the developer’s notice board at work, with the name “Mattias Skarin” written on it.

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