Taking Charge of Running Your Business
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This presentation was given at the Association of Personal Historians' 2014 Annual Conference. The workshop explored techniques to ensure that time spent on daily business activities is time well spent. We learned about setting goals that can be accomplished using a flexible framework for decision making.
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Taking Charge of Running Your Business
- 1. Taking Charge Running Your Business Barb Cagley
- 2. Todays Plan Overview of Personal Kanban Setting Goals Making Decisions Multitasking Building Your Kanban
- 3. What is Personal Kanban Backlog Doing Done
- 4. Only Two Rules Visualize your work Limit your work-in-progress
- 5. Kanban Board
- 6. Setting Goals Yearly Quarterly Monthly Weekly Kanban Backlog
- 7. Model of Attention Processes Awareness Attention Action Decide whether or not to act Between the narrowing phase and the decision phase, attention is paid to a particular item Items come into awareness NARROWING PHASE DECISION PHASE Source: The Attention Economy - Thomas H. Davenport, John C. Beck
- 8. Multitasking Exercise 1 2 3 4 … 10 i ii Iii iv … x A B C D … J stop
- 9. Building Your Kanban Board Backlog Post-its with all the tasks you want to do VALUE STREAM Doing (3) Work-in- Progress Done Completed FLOW
- 10. Value Stream MY VALUE STREAM Backlog Design Production Review Done
- 11. Backlog Photo Source: www.personalkanban.com
- 12. Weekend projects When I get the money Personal Clients Quick tasks Big hunk of time Promises to others Errands CategorizeYour Backlog Photo Source: www.personalkanban.com
- 13. Limiting Your Work-in-Progress Photo Source: www.personalkanban.com
- 14. Done Photo Source: www.personalkanban.com
- 15. The Plan Set yearly goals – break down goals to weekly task for the backlog Remember Awareness Attention Action when making decisions Personal Kanban’s two rules Visualize your work Limit your work-in-progress
- 16. Follow the Blog www.PersonalKanban.com
Editor's Notes
- My name is Barb Cagley and my company is Stories Worth Retelling, I owned and operated a website marketing firm that employed 18 people. I felt my full-time job was trying to discover new ways to be more effective, better organized and how to better manage my time. I had a team of graphic designers and programmers – the two types of brains were a challenge to manage as one team so I started investigating different project management disciplines. Over the years I adapted what I learned and am here today to share with you. These are tools you can use if you are sole proprietor, work with a team virtual or in person. I felt that I was spending a lot of time on tasks that were a waste of time and was not able to spend enough time on the important tasks. I went to networking events because I knew it was an important activity yet I was pretty sure I was wasting my time. I would send out e-newsletters and be so glad it was off my to-do list I wouldn’t think about it again. I spent the days juggling all the balls people would throw and felt proud of my multi-tasking abilities and anxious for everyone to go home so I could get some work done. At a certain point I decided I needed to be purposeful with my time because I had limits. I read two books; the Attention Economy By Thomas H. Davenport, John C. Beck and Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry that changed how I worked. Combining the information I gathered from these books I developed a system. Today I am going to talk about how to make intentional decisions, And a tool get things done the right way the first time so you don’t have to go back and re-work things and save time, reduce stress. I am not talking about the what work to do but the process for doing your work flexible enough to work with your personal life and your business. Overview of Kanban – This is a tool to get work done efficiently that improves quality and reduces stress Setting Goals - so we can make good decisions Making decisions that are intentional and have value based on goals Multitasking And finally I will teach you how to build a Kanban board so you can get started right away
- Personal Kanban is a tool that will help you improve the quality of your work, prioritize work, reduce stress Stay focused Kanban 1950’s Toyota pioneered Kanban, the word means sign board. higher quality of work and lower level of stress and Kanban worked. I became familiar with Kanban when I started exploring Project Management tools. Kanban has been popular in Silicon Valley with IT for years. What I am going to teach today is Personal Kanban. It is called “Personal” tasks or work of personal value as they travel thru a less predictable path “industrial manufacturing fixed procedures of Toyota. Flexible - personal life, for your business pre-school classes to Fortune 10 companies. Personal Kanban forces us to continually visualize – tasks and commitments and helping us prioritize and complete them. simplest form tracking work through path or flow Backlog – Doing - Done
- TWO THE RULES Kanban is simple and has only two Rules to follow Visualize your work piles on my desk, a list. Once of folder goes in the file cabinet it is forgotten Limit your work-in-process
- This is what a simple Kanban board looks like. electric version and paper versions. Work moves or flows across a Kanban to completion in a simple workflow from Backlog, Doing and Done. simplicity seemed to basic to me waste of time but the reality is the simplicity is why it is powerful. Advantages: Quickly shows us the work we have in progress, Remind us of work we haven’t gotten to yet, to help prioritize and how efficiently we work and helps us understand how long it takes to do work Clarity is a tremendous psychological lift reducing stress. Most important Rule #2 Personal Kanban forces us to focus on one task at a time. adaptable to all situations and accessible to all learning styles. Kanban is a pattern, not an edict. mold it into whatever shape of form that works best for you. I will show you different boards with more stages later. how to make the decisions of that tasks or work should be in the backlog. working efficiently is to work on only projects that have value so that is where I am going to go next
- My belief is goal planning is essential to making intentional decisions. If you don’t know where you are going you won’t know how to get there. I set goals for sales/revenue and goals for the marketing activities I plan to do to achieve the sales I want. my prospect database by 12% break down the goals to quarters, monthly, weekly or daily activities. about 1% per month, .25% per week. one networking event per week, one coffee per week, one blog entry every two weeks, one presentation per month... to measure it’s effectiveness. I will measure and review data quarterly and then adjust my plan accordingly. The point is this funnel approach of goal setting and measuring is breaking down the process into daily or weekly goal and measuring the activities. Breaking down goals to small weekly actions can ensure I am constantly moving forward. Clear actionable task are added to my Kanban board ALSO By knowing my expected outcome I can make better decisions Another example One of my goals this year is to sell four of my photo curating packages. I have decided that my target audience is professionals with young families. Quarterly - Donate to silent auctions Monthly - workshop with pre-school PTA’s Bi-Weekly – Blog to donate to their silent auction. I asked questions to find out more about the demographics of the people who would be attending the event, determined they were my target audience for my photo curating services and so I offered that service as the item decisions quickly and concisely because I knew my goals were women’s expo contacted me wanting me to participate and after a few questions asked I determined this was not the right audience and I declined. Pre-determining what I want to achieve really helps making quick, decisive decisions so I can stay focus. business owners throwing time and money away marketing to the wrong audience I believe this happens is because they do not have enough of a direction or information to make decisions. Setting goals for the year and having daily visual reminder of the tasks that need to be performed to achieve the goal is Kanban’s #1 rule, visualizing your work will help avoid this problem. Another reason is business owners tend to forget how valuable their time is. If I told you every hour you have in your day is worth $50 and you are going to spend 3 hours at a network event between driving, eating and talking to people. The event cost $25 and your time was $150. You are spending $175, you better come back to the office with at least 3 new business cards to add to your LinkedIn network and one person who you are going to get together for coffee. So if every hour is worth real money how do you make sure what you are doing with your time is of the most value?
- This is model published The Attention Economy that I adapted to help me make purposeful decisions. Steps go through in decision making Awareness Attention Action – transitions Narrowing – Decision In the first stage, Awareness Information moves from awareness through the Narrowing phase. In the Narrowing phase you decide, almost at a sub-conscience level, to give Attention to some information. Once you have given something your Attention a decision needs to be made as to the Action you will take. You may choose to do nothing and nothing is the action. I am not talking about Attention like Attention span that is so often discussed. Again this process is mostly done at a sub-conscience level you already do all of the at a subconscious level. raise it to a conscience level. This is to ensure your Actions are thought out based on goals you set. For Example: You are attending a networking event You have decided your goal is to connect with three people that could use your services. You are talking with someone – they are talking but none of what they are saying is relevant to you – you never start the narrowing phase OR You start listening and start the Narrowing process, and determine if this a person you can help. Because of your specific goal you are paying attention so you can make a decision of what Action you are going to take. I can help you let’s talk further I cannot help you exchange business cards and excuse yourself. If your narrowing process doesn’t work, too many things will try to rise to the level of attention leading to inaction.
- With goals set, tasks determined, decisions made efficiently and purposefully you are ready to take charge and run your business. So turn on the multitasking skills. How many of you feel the key to running your business effectively is to be a great multi-tasker? How many of you think you are pretty good at multi-tasking? Test By thinking of one task at a time you can keep thing separate in your mind You do not need to filter out out irrelevant information, which our brains are not good at Memory problems This is why Kanban is important #2 rule is to limit Work-in-progress. We cannot efficiently multitask. Using Kanban correctly your will discipline yourself to work on one thing at a time.
- First I want to introduce the elements of the board and then we can get into customization and details: Multiple columns – these are called the value stream Tasks written on post-it move from column to column when you are working on them and this is called Flow Step One: Establish Your Value Stream In a basic Value stream you make a column for Backlog, Doing and Done. You can do this on a piece of paper, wall, poster board, chalk board or white board. I would recommend a white board. Overtime you are going to adjust and refine the board based on the projects you have and the white board is flexible. I have seen people using scrapbooks or a software program for the board. I would not recommend this at first because you want to always be visible. You are referring to it often, One of the reasons it works is because you work is visible and a majority of people need to see information to be reminded of it. Step Two: Establish your Backlog Your backlog is all the work you have to do. Write all your tasks, big and small on individual Post-its. Write down everything you can think of and keep the post-its close because you are going to continue to remember things for awhile, not to mention new tasks that you come up with. This is a big brain dump and actually feels good to get them out of your head and on the board although the board might start feeling overwhelming. Don’t worry. The process relives stress because you will see project get done. I like to color code my tasks using different color post-its. Tasks that are for my company are blue, for my home orange, for my family are pink. This is a flexible system and you will always be refining things. Step Three: Establish Your WIP Work in Process is what you are working on right now. Choose one thing that you are working on and put the post-in in the Doing column. Remember Rule #2 - Limit WIP. By working exclusively on one task until it is completed you are: 1. Removing stress because you are not leaving something half done 2. Improving quality because you are focusing on it without multi-tasking 3. Completing it faster and avoiding re-work because you don’t have to try to remember where you left off and rehash things. Sometimes a task is held up because you need input from others. I do as much as I can then move it to the lower part of the column where I know it is on hold. This is helpful to remind me whose “court” it is in and not forget about the task. I add (3) so you never have more than 3 items in the column – there are different rules of thumb 1 – 5. Three works for me 1 WIP for my business, 1 for Family and 1 for myself and I do them during different times of the day or week. The point is when you are working on something stick with it until it is done or on hold. Step Four: Begin to Pull Pull is the Kanban term for moving the task from one stage of the value stream to the next. When you finish a task and pull it into the Done column there is a feeling a satisfaction that is one of the benefits of the tool. Lastly continue to Prioritize, Refine and Reduce waste. Sometime items will sit in Backlog for so long and you will realize it really wasn’t a task worth doing.
- MAPPING YOUR VALUE STREAM The earlier example Kanban board was a basic board. Which is where you will probably want to start. Remember rule #1 Visualize your work this is thought of 2 ways. Seeing your what you are doing and what you need to do but also visualizing the Flow in your value stream. You can build a value stream that closely fits your work by adding more steps or flow. Visualize the flow of how you work. For example: I design books, create videos and organize photos for clients. All of these services have different stages to the job. I start with a design then go into production stage and then a review stage. This is how I visualize the flow of most of my work. Even with personal projects this value stream works for me New Windows Design - determine what type of windows to order Production - order and determine financing Review - construction Car Body Repair Design - determine what work needs to be done and what is done under the warranty Production - call the dealer for an appointment, call my daughter to arrange to be picked up Review - pick up the car and pay Not everything needs all the steps, schedule a hair appointment can jump right into Production. The goal is to try to match your reality as closely as possible and be only as deyailed at necessary to see and understand your work flow. As your use Kanban you will continue to change the stream to better fit your work flow. You will draw a map perfectly but it is ok. To start building your value stream start with the ends in mind What things are you typically doing? If you are a writer Publishing is the end of the flow. Build your value stream with Backlog as the beginning of the flow Publishing at the end and the fill in the steps between as you visualize them. Important to remember Your Value Stream is your best educated guess - it won’t be perfect for everything Your Value Stream will change - don’t get caught up building the perfect stream for a month, refine as you go along. Different phases of project require different streams, keep it general enough that you don’t fall into the trap of a rigid process. It is ok to move to the left - the reality is that conditions change and sometime projects move backwards. If you think of my flow I might have to re-design an approved design because the wife didn’t like it.
- Backlog What should you put in the Backlog. anything you want to get done. I add make specific phone calls to big as planning a trip. When it is a large project I will break down the tasks as I visualize it needs to be handled. If I am planning a trip my tickets might read: Determine what kind of vacation Determine vacation destination Make plane reservations Write itinerary Make hotel reservations
- Weekend projects When I get the money Personal Clients Quick tasks Big hunk of time Promises to others Errands You can then sub-categorize with color post-its
- One of the biggest challenges in limiting WIP because there are always several tasks that at top priorities. I would find myself with two things that have to be done by end of day and know there is not enough time to get them both done well. Emotions take over, I get frantic, try to do both a little and neither are done well. Where Personal Kanban can helps is: You can see it the backlog all the time and that you have several items competing for priority You can make arrangements for a) delegate to someone else or b) explain to whoever that the task is going to be delayed to ensure top quality. And ultimately, it is much faster to do things once correctly than several times incorrectly so you will be faster I put together schedules for all my projects and sometimes I have clients who stick to the schedule. With these clients especially I feel bound not to deviate from the dates listed. Two weeks ago I intended to spend a day editing a video project that was due the next day and had an unexpected problem with another project. There was a time when I would have juggled the two projects by editing the video in between emails, phone calls and decisions about the emergency. The end result - some poor decisions in taking care of the emergency and some sup-par editing. I would send off the sub-par editing work with a note how I would fix things later and feel good that I met the schedule. How do you think that client would feel. Instead, I call the client, told them I need to extend the deadline by a day so I can insure I have done everything to my best the first time. Now I am not wasting the client’s time looking at sub-par work and I am not re-working the job. The biggest value - I removed all the stress I was feeling. Visualizing everything on that board allows you to constantly prioritize and re-evaluate tasks. One thing to remember is that if it were easy to limit WIP, we’d all be doing it already. Limiting WIP is challenging in a world filled with demands and distractions. Often I would be watching my Personal Kanban and, as long as there’s no more three things in DOING, we’ll feel pretty good. Then I started realizing I was cheating with a separate to-do list and let myself get sucked into the multitasking world of email, calls, helping out with one little favor and never focusing on items that are really important to the growth of my company. I am great on client deadlines but not so great with meeting the goals I set for the company. Doing a quick favor fills a need that outweighs a goal that I don’t expect to see results for until the year is up. Going back to small favors It is not uncommon for a client or co-worker to call and ask for a small favor and it does not seem like a big deal to stop help someone out. It is well documented that people routinely underestimate the length of tasks. You probably will spend more time on this favor than you anticipated you will also use up your mental capacity so you will have to figure out “where you were at” on your project you were working on affecting the quality and schedule. I try to check-in and write down your real WIP once a week adding all the little things that week to make it on a list and not my board. The small favors need to make it to the Kanban board. If you have co-workers another advantages of a Kanban board that is public is it show co-workers and managers what you are working on. By seeing the backlog a a discussion can occur and a decision can be made of what should take priority. If a task has to be interrupted keep it in the Doing column so you can back to it. There are different opinions about the maximum WIP ‘s that should be in the Doing column 3 to 5 is the general consensus.
- The last column, let’s call it Done is important for a couple of reasons. One of the big ones is the emotional satisfaction you feel when you complete something. It is also a way to evaluate your work. One practice is to have several sections in your done column to note if you enjoyed a task, or it upset you. This information could be used to be more discriminating when taking on new projects or you can reward yourself when you complete a draining project. Don’t forget that one of the value of Kanban is to relieve stress. Some boards have the done broken down by the seven days of the week so you can learn what the average amount of tasks you complete in a day. This is helpful in determining when to promise work. You can clear the done column whenever makes sense for you. I like to do it monthly and then reflect how the value stream worked for me and do I need any adjustment. Consider if there anything you would like to track and the board will help like amounts of work completed in a day, how much time you spend on work you don’t like, how much time you spend on non-billable time, how much of your time is spent on volunteering... If working with a team great opportunity for weekly reviews
- Set yearly goals – break down goals to weekly task for the backlog Remember Awareness Attention Action when making decisions Personal Kanban’s two rules Visualize your work Limit your work-in-progress
- Personal Kanban was developed by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. The website has loads of tools and information.