If you’ve been reading the “Taming the Chaos for Managers” series thus far, you’ve read about the key concepts of visualizing work, making policies explicit and limiting your work-in-progress. You’ve also learned about helpful ideas such as scheduling focus time and identifying different classes of work. What have you done with that information so far? Take a moment to reflect what you’ve learned from trying to implement these concepts. If you haven’t been able to, ask yourself “why not?”
Everyday Kanban
Discussing Management, Teams, Agile, Lean, Kanban & more
Author: Julia Wester (page 25 of 42)
As I noted last week, managers regularly help their teams tame the chaos that faces them — good managers, at least. However, they rarely ever think to apply the same concepts to their day-to-day work. Hijinks ensue. In Getting Started, I wrote about scheduling focus time, visualizing work and limiting your work-in-progress (WIP). Now, that you’re in the pool and treading water, you need to take back some control and learn how to swim.
A manager’s day can be extremely hectic. First of all, your calendar looks like one solid block of color – you’ll have to schedule that lunch with friends next quarter. You haven’t seen your desk for more than 30 minutes at a time in weeks. Those precious minutes you aren’t in meetings you can be found overseeing or helping people putting out fires, mitigating interpersonal issues that occasionally make you wonder if you have secretly become a kindergarten teacher and are the last to find out, or going glassy-eyed playing the gantt chart equivalent of Tetris. All this and you still feel like you didn’t do your “work” for the day.
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