The Quick Brown Fox

Sometimes everything comes together. I am currently reading Personal Kanban . I had a work-from-home day today, and I had a million small tasks that needed to get done before the kids got home from school and destroyed my quiet space -- documents to write, appointments to make, meetings to attend, and a few household chores (since the one downside of working from home is that I don't get much exercise, throwing a load of laundry in every once in a while at least means I got up and went downstairs). It felt like a lot. Even if I remembered all of it, how was I going to get all of that done?! I followed the recommendation in the book and wrote everything out on sticky notes. Some things, like the meetings, had to be done at a particular time. Calling to make appointments was better not attempted during lunch hour. I wanted to get my documents out for review as early in the day as possible so people had time to look at them. A few minutes on Duolingo would make for a nice afternoo...

It finally happened! We got some pizzas and my team in a room with a clean whiteboard and got to work. I followed the model laid out in Kanban in Action and had them first write down the things they're working on - that took five minutes and generated a staggering number of stickies (some of the team took it to mean "what kind of tasks do you do" rather than specific examples of work items, but I think it's still useful to see the breadth of their work). Then we started walking through the workflow. This varied a lot depending on the team member. Everyone got time at the whiteboard. Once we had gone around the room and agreed that those were the steps, I encouraged them to start turning that brain dump into a flow. We got partway into that exercise before people had to leave for another commitment. Everyone remained engaged through the exercise, and has at least tentatively committed to continuing. I think I did okay with guiding the discussion and letting them fig...