How to create a knowledge worker Gemba

I am a big fan of the work by Jim Benson and Tonianne Barry ever since I read their book: Personal Kanban.

In this article Jim describes an idea that I would like to highlight and expand. He says: we need a knowledge worker Gemba. He goes on to describe how to create that Gemba:

• Create a workcell for knowledge work: Where you can actually observe the team work and interact
• Make work explicit: Without being able to visualize the work in progress, you will not be able to understand the impact of certain dynamics between the team members. Also, you will miss the necessary information that will allow you to understand the obstacles to flow in the team - what prevents value from being delivered.

These are just some steps you can take right now to understand deeply how work gets done in your team, your organization or by yourself if you are an independent knowledge worker. This understanding, in turn will help you define concrete changes to the way work gets done in a way that can be measured and understood.

I've tried the same idea for my own work and described it here. How about you? What have you tried to implement to create visibility and understanding in your work?

Personal Scrum or Work 2.0

So, I've been inflicting Scrum on myself.

This is my "eat your own dog food" because I'm an Agile Coach at the company where I work, which in practice means that I try to work with teams and help them with Agile adoption, and in some cases with the Agile development.

For me to preach Scrum and not do it would be at least incoherent, but I can think of even less nice ways to put it.

So, back to the story. I'm using Scrum patterns for managing my own work. Let me explain this a little bit. I'm following a method for the management of my personal work that resembles and is largely based on the patterns that we see in Scrum.

Here's the key points of how it works:

1. I have the weekly planning (yes, I'm using weekly iterations/sprints) every week on Monday morning. This is where I look at my backlog (personal and team) and the list of meetings for the week and I plan what I will be doing that week. The weekly plan I put on the wall with post-its.
2. Every day in the morning (before opening Outlook) I read my task board on the wall and list for myself what I wil try to accomplish during that day (only that day). This becomes my "daily plan" for the work to be done. And the fact that I review the plan daily also helps me to
3. On Friday I finalize my sprint, do the personal retrospective and review if there's something from that retrospective that I want to add to my Backlog.

There are more details to this, but these are the key points. I'll write about the details later.
The Scrum patterns applied with the above items are:

• The planning day (point 1 above), which in my case is a planning hour (it takes between 45 min and 1,5 hours)
• The daily check (point 2), which is my review of the task board in the morning and the resulting "daily plan"
• The retrospective (point 3). Where I analyze my work week and collect "TRY" items (as in Cockburn's retrospective agenda) that I will implement during next week.

This way I stay familiar with the mechanics of Scrum (not all, but the key points) and have a method for managing my own personal work.

The results have been good. I've developed the concept of personal capacity (velocity in XP), which tells me what I can commit to and gives me a good way to communicate with my stakeholders about what I can and cannot accomplish in one week of work.

As a result of knowing my capacity I can now be proactive and manage the "pipe" of work for the next few weeks (I'm keeping a backlog of three weeks for short term actions in a limited queue: credit for Mary Poppendieck for bringing that up in the training at our company).

Maintaining the limited queue for the next 3 weeks in turn helps me not just avoid over committing to work during the ongoing week, but hopefully also for the next three weeks.

The biggest value I get out of the system though, is that now I really am in control of my work and can make informed decisions constantly. I have a proper time management system in place!

This method I call Personal Scrum, when used to manage my personal work, or Management (as in Work Management) Scrum, when used to manage the work of a management team.