Agile Coaching Blog

Editor’s note: One of our agile coaches and Scrum trainers, Dave Prior, has been keeping a log of his experience using Kanban to manage his own work. You can follow his adventures every other week on our blog.

When this experiment started one of my goals for the first time box/iteration was just to see if I could actually give up my Things task list and follow the practice with a board. I had tried a number of other productivity frameworks and found that only pieces of them stuck. (Someday someone will write on a book on how to finish David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” book and I’ll actually get all the way through it.) And while I know that limiting work in progress is a cornerstone of this type of approach, and I did set WIP limits, I decided to be a little loose with the limits since I was just guessing at what they should be.

Because my larger plan is to test out different approaches to Personal Kanban, I wanted to start as simply as I could manage. I created a task board and began to fill it with post-its. The first lesson I learned was that I had far too much in my to do list to fit on my Kanban board. I decided to limit it to the things that seemed to be the most important at the time.

The Architect of My Own Demise

The most basic way to set up my board would have been to create three columns: On Deck, Doing and Done. I know this. However, when I sat down to work on it, I began struggling with how I would be able to visually understand the different types of things I had to do. [Read more...]

Editor’s note: One of our agile coaches and Scrum trainers, Dave Prior, has been keeping a log of his experience using Kanban to manage his own work. You can follow his adventures every other week on our blog.

I am fairly well versed in how to manage projects. For the past 18 years I have been developing my skills at helping people manage the work they have to do into a state of ninja-like perfection-ish. As I have progressed in my career I have had the good fortune to work on projects of varying size, duration, and cost. Some have been successful, but more have not – and that is okay because those are the ones where I’ve learned the most. To demonstrate my proficiency in my chosen profession I have obtained multiple certifications in project management and agile development. I’ve even spent years teaching others how to get those same certifications. Along the way I also got an MBA to demonstrate… whatever it is an MBA is actually supposed to demonstrate beyond that I am willing to be in debt until I go to my grave. And I’ve given up thousands of hours of personal time leading volunteer organizations that focus in managing work and teaching people how to get better at it. My experiences have taught me many things… most of them the hard way. And with this, I have found only one single truth that spans all of it:

Being skilled at helping others manage their work is no guarantee you will demonstrate any level of skill at managing your own. In fact, I think it is fair to say I pretty much suck at managing my own work. I’m not saying I am not good at getting things done. I get stuff done all day long, and usually, it is the most important stuff. But I’m not good at managing it.

Why Managing Work Is So Hard Nowadays

When I started working in project management, managing stuff was not a problem. [Read more...]