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Understanding: A kanban lets you immediately visualize the weight of commitments you've made, and encourages you to limit your work in progress (WIP). When you can see your current level of commitment, you understand it better.
Assessing Value: This understanding leads to a deeper appreciation for the real value of your time. Not only can you now make better risk assessments, but when you promise someone something you know what the personal cost is of that promise. You will have a better idea about when you can deliver on that promise, without losing sleep.
Mitigating Risk: Making your tasks conspicuous leads to introspection – we start to ask if we are capable of finishing something and how that will impact the other tasks. We can see it on the physical board. We can re-arrange our tasks at-will to create the most productive day.
Prioritization: Now that we have a better understanding of the value of our work and its associated levels of risk, we can better prioritize what it is that we are doing. To be sure, prioritization is still not easy, but at least now we can feel like we’re doing more than engaging in guess-work or putting out fires.
The Personal Value Stream: As we work more with our visualized tasks, we can get a better idea of what our personal value stream is. This might be conceptual, and difficult to put into words. Case in point: Last night, I pulled a piece of meat off the grill. The steak didn’t “look” done, but I knew it was. When I brought it in the house, it was perfectly cooked. I couldn’t explain how I knew it would be, I had just worked with meat on the grill enough to know. Your personal value stream is equally learnable, yet hard to quantify. Knowing your personal value stream greatly helps in the selection of work items and defining done.
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Link to original post From Jim Benson @ Modus Cooperandi
