Lean Software Engineering

Since departing Corbis, I’ve had so many small tasks and projects going on that I’ve been struggling to keep track of everything. The usual strategy of keeping to-do lists on the whiteboard just hasn’t been cutting it. So, I’ve put up a small personal heijunka board, complete with kanban limits to manage things.

The green tickets represent outcomes (goals or tasks, aka requirements). Most goals can be broken up into a number of smaller tasks, and those are the yellow tickets. As usual, the red tickets are problems i.e. andon lights.

Since the task types are heterogeneous, there’s no use for any detailed workflow, so I simply have an In-WIP-Out sequence for each level of task decomposition.

On the left, I have three levels of backlog, by priority. Backlog size decreases as priority increases. P1 are things that need to be done ASAP. P2 are important things that are not time-sensitive yet. P3 is stuff I know I need to do, but not right away. Any more stuff than that is too much to manage. If the board is full, and a new goal is not more important than something already up there, it just falls out of consideration. I figure that I can reasonably manage two goals at a time. If I get tired of working on one thing, or I get blocked (waiting for an event, retail hours, etc.), I can work on the other. More than two would just accumulate inventory, and that’s what the P1 queue is for.