Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life - Softcover

Benson, Jim; DeMaria, Tonianne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1453802266 ISBN 13: 9781453802267

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011

Synopsis

Machines need to be productive, people need to be effective

Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress. Visualizing work allows us to transform our workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices.

Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve how we work to balance our personal, professional, and social lives.

Focus on doing better, not doing more

Using the same Lean principles from manufacturing that led the Japanese auto industry to become a global leader in quality, Personal Kanban applies them to individual and team work.

Understand why we do the things we do

Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context.

Learn why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.

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About this title

About the Author

Jim Benson's 20 years since university have seen him build light rail systems and neighborhoods as a urban planner, enterprise software and web sites for major government agencies as the owner of Gray Hill Solutions, and, most recently, as a collaborative management consultant helping create better working environments for teams of all sizes. The common thread in his history has the physical, regulatory, technological, emotional and political boundaries of community. Jim has worked with corporate, government, and not-for-profit organizations of all sizes. Taking Lean principles from manufacturing and Agile methodologies from software design, Jim Benson and Modus Cooperandi help individuals, teams, and organizations design collaborative systems. These systems are often built using social media technology as an enabler for communication and collaboration. Tonianne DeMaria Barry's consulting career spans the fashion industry and government agencies, non-profit associations and Fortune 100 corporations, start-ups and international development. Her academic training in history lends itself well to management consulting, where she contends that especially in business, the present value of the past is often under-appreciated. Forever asking Why and How things happen, she helps her clients uncover, analyze, and interpret their institutional artifacts. Leveraging the stories and values embedded within an organization's culture, she helps individuals use their history to establish priorities, achieve goals, and make informed and innovative decisions. Much like Personal Kanban itself, she wants her clients to acknowledge their past and present contexts, appreciate the interconnectedness and flow of events, and extract lessons from the patterns which emerge so they can better plan for the future.

From the Inside Flap

• Carmen Medina: Director of Intelligence (Retired) Central Intelligence Agency: Personal Kanban is a must read for knowledge workers and their leaders who recognize that old productivity models don't apply to knowledge work and seek a more realistic and centered approach. The ideas are deceptively simple but in that simplicity is their strength. As soon as I finished reading it, I started drawing out the landscape of my projects and felt much the better for it.
• Ross Mayfield: CEO of SocialText: Personal productivity systems usually fail in practice because of complexity and they don't reflect the collaborative nature of real work. Personal Kanban provides the simplest structure that could possibly work and lets you achieve a state of flow.
• Jerry Michalski: guide, Relationship Economy eXpedition: Trying to get more effective? Why use Rube Goldberg systems of tabulated notebooks and special-purpose inserts? Instead, consider a system that flows like a stream and focuses your attention, both on the task at hand and on making your process more effective. That's what Personal Kanban is, and it may just fit your thinking and doing style.

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1453802266
• ISBN 13: 9781453802267
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216