Kanban Followup

Since I’m stuck at work waiting for a meeting to start (I started this post on Monday night), I figured I would update you on how the Kanban productivity system was working out for me.

For tasks that are repetitive or have very distinctive sections or parts, this system is a great aid. In the middle of using this system to produce a report, I got sick and needed to be out of the office for a couple of days. Upon returning, my Kanban was on my desk giving me a visual clue of exactly where I left off. I was able to quickly get back to my report with little time lost in trying to figure out exactly where I was in the process. Adding the HOLD box allowed me to delay portions that were causing me problems. The extra box under the Done column was added to allow me to quickly answer questions from my manager on a subset of items that fit a specific criteria.

The green post-it tags are inputs to the report that I am writing. The blue tags are sections of the report itself that need to be completed. I put the Kanban in a plastic document sleeve to keep from loosing my tags. As I moved items into the DONE column, I started to tape them down as the tags at this point were starting to loose their stickiness.

For regular usage, I would…

• use the super sticky line of post-its so there is better hold
• always use a plastic document sleeve
• color code the task types to add to the visual value of the Kanban

And I do need to add that it is definitely a positive to have such a visual progress chart for coworkers and managers to fully understand your workload. I can verbally tell you that I am working on generating a report, but that doesn’t fully relay all the input documents that need to be produced and reviewed to generate the report as the Kanban above does.

All in all, the Kanban is an excellent tool for those job tasks with repetitive or distinctive sections. My next step is to evaluate using a Kanban for following a procedure flowchart.