How To See Progress Quickly

Oct 4 / Jim Benson


I have a Personal Kanban, our whole team is visually tracking our work in an Obeya, and we keep up the real-time chatter in slack (which becomes a recurring huddle).

Even with all that, individual tasks or short-sprint projects require their own visualizations. A visualization gives you clarity over the work you are doing right now, what is going right, how (or if) you have achieved flow, and what this might mean for time to completion or a need to call out for help. 

How can I use a visualization for a short project?

Today I needed to make a repetitive update to several classes at Modus Institute. To do that, I went into the system which gave me the navigation to the left.

I would click on a class title and it turns green. To the right of this, the work I needed to do would open and I would do it. Over and over again. For all the classes.

Believe it or not. This is a Personal Kanban. The green Team Prioritization is my WIP, it is my DOING.

How We Can See Work in Real Time

Here we can see the results after I was done working in the Team Prioritization class. 

The Team class moved to the top (sorted by most recently edited). That is my DONE.  

The Use of a Control Feature in Personal Kanban

For the Done and the WIP to make sense there needs to be some sort of line, this is a control feature. Every visual control must have an indicator of control. The control feature shows how close we are to completion.

In this case the control feature is the Lean Agile Visual Management Certification  class, which was the first one I edited. It started at the top and as more things became DONE, it moved down the screen, as did the green WIP. So in the picture above I'm now working on Personal Prioritization.  

And you can see below, while I finish up the last two classes. I see completion as it happens. I get some comfort with my rate of completion and get a good idea based on the flow of the work that I'm doing that I have achieved a predictable productive and effective rate of work through seeing the actual work I am doing.