Agile Australia 2014 | MELBOURNE WORKSHOPS

Visual Project Management - See it to manage it

Healthcare, software development, government, insurance, engineering, management, administration... "knowledge work" is rapidly replacing physical labor. Yet we routinely suffer from overwork, unclear direction, lack of collaboration, and process fatigue, and this weighs us down, resulting in sluggish performance, increased defects, and low morale.

This one-day interactive, intensive, and intense class applies Lean principles and tools to better manage your personal and project work to circumvent chaos, communications issues, and low morale. Creator of Personal Kanban Jim Benson, and author of the Shingo Award-winning book "Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life," will introduce this Lean tool to understand, plan, and act on the options we have available at work. In this class, we will discuss how knowledge workers primarily do their work using their brains and, therefore, any personal or team optimizations need to focus on the actual people doing the work.

A one-day Personal Kanban class can cover the following. In practice, attendees tend to drive the direction of the class, as different groups have different elements of Lean, Personal Kanban, personal work, and teamwork that they want to discuss.

Lean Knowledge Work: What is knowledge work? Why is it so hard to plan for? What prevents us from estimating effectively? Why are we always overworked?

Personal Kanban as a Personal Framework: How to get out of the overworked knowledge worker rut? Personal Kanban is a powerful and simple framework for understanding personal and team workloads. We will discuss using value stream mapping, work item identification, task sizing, work-in-process limits, dynamic collaboration, measuring variation, the psychology of work, and learning processes such as single- and double-loop learning.

Visualising Work and Limiting Work-in-Process: We will discuss in detail the benefits of Lean for work completion, quality, reporting, collaboration, and peace of mind. We will discuss value stream mapping, the identification of work item types, how to visualize non-conforming work, how to identify common tasks and work, and how to visualize multiple projects. We will discuss this by building a Personal Kanban board together with the participants that relates to work immediately relevant to them.

We will discuss the impacts of overwork and task-switching, and how to visualize those impacts in the visual system. We will discuss the Lean concept of flow and what it means to knowledge workers. We will also discuss valuing completion with quality over simply starting tasks. These concepts will be discussed by actively using the Personal Kanban from the previous lecture.

Implementing Personal Kanban: No one leaves class without knowing where to begin. We will discuss our individual implementations, impediments to using Personal Kanban and Lean ideals, and the use of the Lean Coffee format. We will discuss what that means for individuals and what the impacts are on co-workers.

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JIM BENSON

Jim Benson is the creator of "Personal Kanban," a lean process used to manage knowledge workers. Knowledge work is a fundamentally tricky type of work to gain focus around, as those engaged in this type of work are by nature inventive. Invention and innovation are unpredictable, and related tasks are often amorphous. For the past two decades Jim has worked at uncovering ways for individuals and groups to communicate, collaborate, and find clarity in unpredictable and amorphous environments. He is also the CEO of Modus Cooperandi, a company focusing on collaborative management. He writes about and works with clients to achieve cultures of continuous improvement. These cultures actively seek out opportunities to improve job satisfaction and/or performance. Since starting Modus, Jim has helped clients as diverse as The World Bank, The United Nations, NBC Universal, The Library Corporation, and Comcast find collaborative solutions, identify and implement improvements, and create more innovative cultures.

workshop	Visual Project Management - See it to manage it with Jim Benson
when	Monday 16 June 2014 \| 9am - 5pm
where	Melbourne Convention Centre 1 Convention Centre Place, South Wharf VIC 3006
cost*	$800 Incl. GST from 18 April 2014

* Workshop registration includes morning and afternoon tea and lunch. Workshop registration is independent of conference registration. Conference registration excludes access to workshops.

Not in Melbourne? Join us in Sydney on Thursday 19 June 2014 for Jim's workshop »

Melbourne Workshop

Visual Project Management - See it to manage it

Visual Project Management - See it to manage it

JIM BENSON

Workshop Details