I, too, have been looking into Agile and Kanban as possible sources of inspiration for personal knowledge innovation work. From what I’ve learned, I tend to agree with the critical sentiments here. It seems like Kanban processes are invaluable for teams, but get weird with individuals.
The fundamental goal of Kanban seems to be to coordinate the use of limited resources (time, materials) by a team. That point is literally lost when there’s only one person using the resources.
The four principles of Kanban are, roughly:
- Make the work you have to do — and the status of each piece of work — visible
- Limit work-in-progress
- Make sure work flows forward
- Regularly review how work is happening, enacting changes to workflow based on feedback
What I take from this as an individual knowledge worker:
- What are the different statuses of my tasks? What does the progress of one task look like from “not started” to “complete”?
- Limit work-in-progress — try not to take on too much, and try to constrain the time you spend on one thing (although this is difficult when you’re your own boss)
- If you know the status of different tasks, use status to catch when you’re getting stuck. Interrogate what’s causing stuck-ness.
- Be sure to include double-loop-learning in your working habits. E.g., Are you getting stuck by the same thing often? Is there a different way of working so you don’t get stuck again?
Otherwise, the “card boards” people often call “Kanbans” are really just a neat visual way of representing what’s happening. But just using a card board to lay things out =/= implementation of the kanban principles… nor should it!
Nice pullquote!
PS: @jcarucci nice topic!