This week started a bit late due to a public holiday, the Hindu new
years celebrations, (the joys of working in a country that respect 4
different religions and celebrate all the main events publicly!) and
then we had been spread out during the weekend. It took some time to
gather the forces.
Last week we were a bit confused about the lead
times and throughput. Sure enough this week we did some more items, due
to the ketchup-effect of doing to big items. We are continuing to track
both the lead time per size (S, M and L) and the number of items (or
each size) that we are completing per week.
It’s still a little too little data to draw any conclusions but we are
confident that with this data tracked we will soon start to understand
our work.
Retrospectives
Today I told the team that the little sessions where we stop and think
how we can improve are called retrospective. They all went: OK, who
cares? which was exactly what I suspected and wanted. The name and
format really doesn’t matter. That you do
stop up and reflect on how you can improve regularly
does matter!
The retrospective today, 2 days delayed due to Hindu public holiday and
not all people being office, was particular interesting. We rather have
everyone there than do it on a certain date. But we hold a improvement
meeting every week.
The Todo-stage
This weekend we had a meeting we all the leaders of our customers, the
directors of the hospitals. From that meeting came a flood of small
tasks that we needed to address; write PMs, check on status for
projects, help people start using tools etc. etc. So we saw a need to do
something about our board structure.
Right now we only had three columns: Todo, Doing and Done. Particulary
the Todo-column bother us, since it contained a lot of stuff on very
different time scale. Something was a 2 months project that we need to
do before 2015. Another thing was to send a couple of emails to check
the status of a project somewhere. After some discussion we decided to
do something that looked like this:
Here's what we decided to do:
- We kept the Doing and Done columns (although I showed you what we
did with the Done-column later)
- The Todo column have a limit of max 6 items, we later changed that
to 8.
- We changed the name of "To do this week", meaning that this is
imminent items that we have decided to do as soon as we're done
doing the things in Doing.
- The Todo column has a prioritised order from top to bottom.
- When we put something in Todo we also set S, M or L on the item if
it's not already classified. And note the date when it was put into
the Todo-column.
- We added a "Next" column before that. To better understand it we
called it "Next month", meaning that this column contains stuff that
is worthy our attention but not now. Usually this means work that we
will start within a month. We write the items in the "Next
month"-column on cards but there's no other requirements for them.
There's no order either. Just a bunch of stuff.
- Finally we added an Ideas-column where we could note down ideas.
These can big project or small tasks. There's no order, just a
couple rows of text. No cards even.
We then created three piles of cards and moved everything on the board
to the correct pile. This is what it looked like, at one stage, during
our little exercise:

Elin took the responsibility to put all of this back on the board,
producing "much nicer signs over each column" too. My writing was not
satisfactory I'm willing to agree on. Here's how the reorganised board
looked like:

### The move from Idea to Next, and from Next to Todo
One could wonder how we decide on what to move into the "Next
month"-column from the "Ideas"-list. Or from the "Next month"-column to
Todo. Here, this makes me very proud, we're trying an experiment
combining ideas from
David Marquet and
Aptitud (my Swedish
employer).
Here's what we decided to do, if you're out of work:
See if there's anything that you can help to finish in Doing. If so - do
it!
If not, see if there's anything worth starting from Todo. If so - do it!
If you still don't have anything to do
- check the "Next month"-column for something that looks interesting
- Get at least one other person to the board and explain what you are
planning to do.
- Start by saying something like "I intend to do ... because I think
that would help our clinics and hospitals by ..."
Still out of work - check the Ideas column and repeat the process for
the Next column above. This is often "bigger" work items so maybe you
should involve a couple of more people in the decision.
Still out of work? Do something that's fun and that you think will help
us
I love that "I intend to" - part ripped from David Marquet's excellent
book
Turn the ship around and could probably write a
couple of post on that alone. But i will not.
The part on involving more people in your decision the bigger it gets is
something we have used at Aptitud. Works great there! Buying a new
computer - ask a colleague and describe your reasons to her. Hiring a
new colleague, involve a few more people in the decision.
### The Done-column

The "Done"/"Selesai" column is now reduced to reporting only and has
been move off the board (aka the cupboard) altogether. We created a very
simple reporting sheet where we just note down the size of each item as
well as the start and stop date. This will make it simple to produce our
diagrams as shown last week.
Since we have a limited amount of cards we moved them back to the
starting point pretty fast anyway so there was no real use of having a
column of "done" stuff.
### Conclusion
All in all this was a very refreshing exercise. As I said in the
beginning the important thing is that we always are **trying to
improve**, experimenting with different things. This week it was like
this.