Posts Tagged ‘Visual Management’

Delegating with a Kanban

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

A partner in the tax practice of a law firm asked me, “How can I keep better track of the work the associates are doing? And how can I stay on top of the work I’ve delegated to them?”

Tracking work that others are doing is a common problem, particularly in a high-priced law firm, where the clients want answers to their questions at the most inopportune times — like the middle of dinner, or just after you’ve settled into watching Toy Story 1 & 2 with your kids. To be fair, if you’re charging them $800 per hour, you should be ready to answer those questions. However, hounding your team to get you that information — especially when they’re watching Toy Story with their kids — is a sure way to get your firm de-listed from the “100 Best Places To Work.”

So what can you do?

Inspired by Lee Fried at Group Health Cooperative, and by Jim Benson over at Personal Kanban, I realized that the kanban is an ideal answer. (For those readers who don’t know what a kanban is, for the purposes of this post, just think of it as a white board or bulletin board that’s visible in the work area.)

Put each person’s name down the left side of the kanban and create a row for each of them. Put the task they’re assigned in the next column, and the expected completion date next to that. If you want to be fancy, you can even include some symbol that indicates about how far along they are in completing the work. Have another column that holds a simple red/green signal that indicates they’re on track or they’ve fallen behind. And that’s it.

What you’ve created is a simple visual management tool that allows you to quickly see how each person is doing. Here’s an example of what it might look like:

Sample delegation kanban

In this screenshot, I’ve adopted Jim’s approach (and terminology) by breaking work into three buckets: “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done.” This added information helps provide context for where you are in a larger project.

There’s nothing earth-shaking about this approach, but I think it falls into the sweet spot between something that’s too small for full-blown project management software, and something that’s to big for a one-person task list. Having it prominently posted ensures that the work doesn’t disappear into a computer file. And the red/green status bar enables someone to signal for help without having to schedule a formal meeting.

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Lean and the power of communication.

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

I attended the LEI’s Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit last week in Orlando and was impressed by all the attendees’ dedication to improvement. The problems with our healthcare system — and the healthcare insurance system — are legion, but seeing the accomplishments of this group gives me some measure of hope that things might actually get better.

Amidst all the value stream maps and photos of 5S initiatives, one thing that really hit me was how communication lies at the heart of so much of lean. From kanbans to value stream maps, from daily huddles to managerial standard work from 5S to A3s, I kept seeing how clear, concise, and consistent communication eliminates waste, creates value, and focuses activity and attention on what’s important. When you think about it, a kanban is a form of communication that tells someone that something needs to be done at a certain time. Value stream maps are a kind of visual communication that helps reduce misunderstandings. Daily huddles are clearly about communication of problems (and solutions), while manager standard work is a way to routinize and clarify communication up, down, and across an organization. 5S is a way to help communicate abnormalities in a process or place. A3s are an elegant and concise method of communicating just about anything. And you can’t go to any lean plant or office without seeing visual management boards that essentially are just forms of communication.

So this got me thinking about the waste of time, effort, and energy that goes into what passes for communication in most organizations. You know — confusing emails with no clear purpose. Voice mails that don’t answer questions, but instead just ask you to “call me back” (and race through the telephone number at the end). Soul-sucking meetings that serve no point except the aggrandizement of the organizer’s ego. Proposals and reports that deforest half of Brazil without telling a coherent story. That’s a colossal amount of waste.

By no means am I diminishing the importance of the lean tools that are so often discussed. But it does make you wonder: what would happen if we spent even just a little time on improving the quality of the communication within and between organizational silos?

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Four tools for making work visible.

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

In general, I’m not a big fan of fancy time management hardware or software. As the saying goes, automating a broken process gets you a faster (and more expensive) broken process. Far better to use a simple system to fix the process and then automate as necessary. (Kevin Meyer is the chief apostle of this approach, with his pizza and whiteboard replacement for an ERP system.) Even buying special pre-packaged and printed day planners fits into this category, since you get locked into someone else’s proprietary and inflexible system.

Having said that, there are some interesting websites that can give you greater visibility in how you’re spending your time. They won’t actually help you, you know, do anything important, but by making your actions visible, they can help spur behavioral change.

The Wall Street Journal covered four of the services (Slife, RescueTime Pro, ManicTime, and Klok) last week. Each one has strengths and weaknesses, but will no doubt be improved over time. I won’t bother reviewing them as you can read the WSJ article for free here.

I’m good with a watch, a piece of paper, and some discipline. However, if new tools will help you get started down this road, by all means read the article and check them out. The important issue, I think, is not so much what tool you use, but rather that you’re committed to making the invisible — i.e., where and how you spend your time and attention — visible. Once you’ve done that, you can start to analyze the current state and implement countermeasures to improve it. As the WSJ authors wrote,

All in all, the services really helped us get a handle on how we spend our work time. And having a written account of where our minutes went pushed us to modify our work habits—and get more done.

These tools aren’t panaceas. But it might get you started in living the lean principles that you’re trying to drive through the organization.

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