Practice Makes Perfect - The Six Core Practices For Expertly Managing Work
How the 6 Kanban Practices can help you and your teams take back ownership of how you deliver your projects.
Hey, my name is Tristan Hood and I love helping leaders and teams find new and better ways of managing work. I believe continual, organic change is far superior to large transformation, unless absolutely necessary of course. As such, I created this blog with the intent to share my experiences, wins, and losses.
Introducing a New Series!
Hello again! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! It feels like it’s been a while since I have spent some time with you, and that’s largely due to a small dose of writers block followed by a few months of deep focus with a new set of clients. I took some time over the last few months to do some traveling, spend some time with family, and learn a few new things. Through all of that I have a wealth of Tidbits to share with you! What better way to end one year and start another than with fresh experiences and content!
No One Is Perfect
To kick things off, I’ll start with a series of Tidbits around Kanban’s six core practices. I spent the last half a decade teaching these practices to over 30 different teams and their leaders with great success. Almost every one of them started with someone uttering the phrase, “This will never work for us.” And then it did. “But Tristan, we use (insert ‘Agile’ framework here) and can’t possibly change!
I’m so glad you brought that up.
My most recent engagements have helped me realize these practices are not just fundamental to expert work management, but also the fundamental practices of every “Agile framework” floating around the business world. (SAFe, LeSS, KMM, etc)
For the next 6 weeks, I want to share some experiences as I have observed and coached teams adopting these practices.
This week, however, I just want to introduce you to the six practices.
Six Practices to Better Manage Your Work
While these don’t have to be adopted in a particular order, people love a good dose of ordered steps. I will admit, when layered in this fashion and infused with the Three Principles of Kanban, these practices will help you Unhide your work, and optimize its flow more consistently than if you only pick and choose, but you will improve no matter where you start. Let’s take a quick look at each one.
Visualize - Encourages you to make visual as much as possible about the way you work. The work, your workflow, and various other aspects are all candidates for visualization. We will talk making Kanban boards with a Learning & Development group.
Limit Work In Progress - Practice reducing the amount of work in progress and you will see MORE work get done, not less. (Little’s Law anyone?) For this one, we will discuss WIP Limits for the Fox Squad.
Manage Flow - Practice managing and measuring the flow of work through your workflow to illuminate and eliminate issues. We talk blockers and metrics! I have a cool story about a security team that worked to reduce some dependencies.
Make Policies Explicit - Practice writing down the ways in which your team agrees to manage work to further capitalize on the Visualize practice. While it sounded like Rules Management, I helped a squad learn when to break the rules instead.
Incorporate Feedback Loops - Practice a set of cadenced meetings with your team and create better collaboration and decision making. What if I told you your team could have all the conversations necessary to deliver a great service using only 4 hours of meetings?
Continually Improve - Practices continually improving all of these practices and change will become part of your culture. Did I ever tell you the story of the time I had an eBay business?
Landing the Plane
These practices are critical to becoming experts at managing work and I am going to give you practical steps on how to start using each immediately. No big frameworks. No messy transformations. Just some great stories and tips on how to sprinkle these practices on top of what you already do today like sprinkling salt on your mashed potatoes.
Until next week,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.