set MVP and WIP for your goals. How Kanban improve my personal deliverables.

How often do you face the situation when you feel really motivated and promise yourself that you will definitely change something?

Days pass and you (me), are in the same place…

How many times?!!!!

Ambition…

We are ambitious, and that’s good. Thanks to our ambitions, we were able to achieve big things. On the macro scale, we land on the moon and on the micro scale, you successfully delivered a project on time. All these things are awesome, but require from us great focus and effort. With ambition, we are able to learn new things and transform this knowledge into ideas and actual things.

…causes demotivation

Unfortunately, most of the time, our ambitions are too big and our goals end up being almost unachievable. I saw this pattern thousands of times, mostly at the beginning of things: the beginning of the new year, new project, new idea, we promise that this time it will be different.

How to make it different?

There are good practices which can be taken from IT world MVP and WIP

Minimum valuable product (MVP) — “is the smallest thing you can build that delivers customer value (and as a bonus captures some of that value back).”

Work in progress (WIP) — “…also called work in process, is inventory that has begun the manufacturing process and is no longer included in raw materials inventory, but is not yet a completed product…

…WIP is an indicator of waste caused by bottlenecks in the manufacturing process or an unstable supply chain. Too much work in progress is undesirable because it ties up money that could be generating higher returns somewhere else in the company.”

duhh… but how does this apply to my goals?

Imagine that you want to go from point A to point B. Easy isn’t it? In theory, we just start moving and things start to happen.

From my experience, most of the time we will get stuck somewhere in the very beginning just because we can’t even see B or C over the horizon.

MVP to the rescue.

In the Agile, Lean world we are taught that we should build our products incrementally to be more responsible, welcome the change, and reduce the impact of misunderstanding (fast feedback loops).

If we look at this approach we notice that it makes perfect sense to apply this way of thinking and doing to your personal goals.

Build your goals based on small increments, do not assume that you will start from A and finish at B. Always try to split your goals into pieces that are as small as possible. This will give you the feeling that you are progressing and make you more responsible for the changes. This approach also can give you a boost in motivation. Smaller goals are easier to achieve and every achievement is a mental reward. Final points (B and C) will eventually emerge from the smaller steps.

Hold your horses, WIP in practice.

Some might think; if I set up a lot of small goals, I will achieve my goal faster, especially if I do the “tasks” in parallel. Nothing could be more wrong.

Every task that is started and never finished, is a waste and we tend to very easily fall into the trap of starting things but never finishing them.

The best example to prove that multitasking is not the most efficient way of doing things is as follows. According to Little’s law we can easily speed up our rate of task delivery (LT) just by reducing the number of items in the queue (WIP), assuming that our system is stable (Throughput).

Story time !

Imagine that winter has just begun, you have special abilities and you want to knit new gloves, a hat, and a scarf. It is really cold outside and your old clothes aren’t in fashion this year.

Each box represents one unit of work that can be done to finish a piece of clothing. Assume that you start doing 3 things in parallel (gloves, hat, and scarf) and that your capacity for work is one unit of work per week, according to Little’s law you will spend much more time to finish any one particular item

Why ?

LT = WIP / Throughput, so:

3 (1 part of scarf, 1 part of gloves, and 1 part of hat) / 1 (1 part per week) = 3 weeks

Since you can only finish one unit of work per week and you started three at the same time, you will have to wait 3 weeks to have one whole part ready out of each item. With this approach, your head is going to freeze.

Look what happens when we reduce the number of WIP to 1.

1 (1 part of hat) / 1 (1 part per week) = 1 week

If you only start the hat, then after 1 week, you will already have finished the same amount pieces from the hat. If you keep going like this, you will eventually finish the hat much earlier than you would have otherwise.

Context switching.

And what if I tell you there is another scary thing that slows us down and makes us even less productive.

In Gerald Weinberg’s book Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking “is written that every context switch costs us 10% of our time so that when you are switching between 3 tasks, you have ONLY 40% time being devoted to actual work.

If we combine this with Little’s Law, we can deduce that multitasking isn’t always the wisest thing. What this teaches us is that sometimes it’s better to focus on a limited number of small and therefore achievable tasks and only starting other ones once those are finished, rather than trying to do everything all at once.

Of course it’s always good to have a bigger goal, but by working towards smaller ones, you are able to react quickly to the changing environment. Who knows if B is really place where you want to be, maybe A is actually enough, or you fall in love in with C and decide that is enough…