One trick I commonly use when I join a team to help them with their effectiveness:
"Let's look at 'done' and analyze what's in there."
If they color-code planned work and interruptions ("green" vs "purple" work items), it can be as simple as taking a look at the done column.
"Oh, we have 20-odd items here, and only two were planned."
"There's the expedite lane, which has two dozen items in the done column, while the regular work has like three."
(These are actual stories, BTW.)
There are very few observations that instantly tell us as much about the nature of work as this one. The current state of the board (in the "active" part) may be messy, but it can always be an edge case.
Done bucket, on the other hand, stacks over time. Think of it as sedimentation in geology. We can reverse engineer quite a lot of information, looking at what's there and how it is layered.
Also, that's another reason to like physical boards. If purging the done column becomes a physical/haptic experience, we pay more attention to what we actually move to the archive. It's so much different from the one-click "archive all" action, which we typically get in a digital tool.
In the back of the Personal Kanban book we had all sorts of design patterns. In the years since I've published maybe 100 more. And still I see people with boards that are just flowing to do lists and don't solve real needs.
I feel I could make posters out of every paragraph in this one. There's something in modern work that is just a magnet for distraction and the need to build in a pause is crucial as otherwise the only work you complete is the distraction work.
All our communications systems combine to create their own overload. Communication between team members essentially is proportional to the lack of ability to align, collaborate on, and track work. Those three things interact and compound questions, concerns, and confusion.
One trick I commonly use when I join a team to help them with their effectiveness:
"Let's look at 'done' and analyze what's in there."
If they color-code planned work and interruptions ("green" vs "purple" work items), it can be as simple as taking a look at the done column.
"Oh, we have 20-odd items here, and only two were planned."
"There's the expedite lane, which has two dozen items in the done column, while the regular work has like three."
(These are actual stories, BTW.)
There are very few observations that instantly tell us as much about the nature of work as this one. The current state of the board (in the "active" part) may be messy, but it can always be an edge case.
Done bucket, on the other hand, stacks over time. Think of it as sedimentation in geology. We can reverse engineer quite a lot of information, looking at what's there and how it is layered.
Also, that's another reason to like physical boards. If purging the done column becomes a physical/haptic experience, we pay more attention to what we actually move to the archive. It's so much different from the one-click "archive all" action, which we typically get in a digital tool.
In the back of the Personal Kanban book we had all sorts of design patterns. In the years since I've published maybe 100 more. And still I see people with boards that are just flowing to do lists and don't solve real needs.
I feel I could make posters out of every paragraph in this one. There's something in modern work that is just a magnet for distraction and the need to build in a pause is crucial as otherwise the only work you complete is the distraction work.
All our communications systems combine to create their own overload. Communication between team members essentially is proportional to the lack of ability to align, collaborate on, and track work. Those three things interact and compound questions, concerns, and confusion.