Lose Customers with Disorganized Workflows

Last week my wife and me went to the traditional Saint Martin Procession with our son. It was a nice walk with all those gleaming hand laterns of the kids. The walk ended at a school were the local music society had prepared some food and beverages. Ordering and delivery was organized as follows:

• At the cash desk customers have to buy vouchers for specific food and beverage
• One person works at the cash desk
• Left of the cash desk all beverages are handed out
• Three persons are in charge of handing out the beverages
• Right of the cash desk all food is handed out (french fries, German "Bratwurst", stuff like that)
• Four persons are in charge of handing out the food

When we arrived at that location I hurried to the cash desk only to append myself to a long row of approximately 50 people waiting. After 5 minutes there were still 40 people in front of me.

There were several severe problems in the way of organization:

• Only one person at the cash desk. Maybe a single resource would have been able to handle the queue of people but unfortunately this person was the slowest imaginable.
• No team work. All the resources had been strictly assigned to their specific stations. No one was able or willing to help at another station to deal with overloads.
• No one-way routing of customers. After the cash desk first you had to decide to move left or right and cross the row of people in front of the cash desk again to go to the other side.

It really was a mess and I analyzed all these problems within the first minute of waiting. If they only would have organized their work order with a simple kanban, everyone would have been happy with a faster delivery of finished orders to the customers.

We finally decided to abort this experiment after 15 minutes, walked away and got something to drink at home. So my conclusion is: disorganized workflows loses customers.

Personal Taskboard: Evolution to Mobile

The major disadvantage of a wall-based personal taskboard is its pure static character. You can't take it with you for travelling or for working on it at home.

Here's the solution: the mobile personal taskboard.

Side note: this version of the personal taskboard is not used by myself but I like the idea a lot. For me it works to move the 2 most important task from my wall-based board into my paper book. So my paper book is some kind of additional optional external kanban lane.

Don't forget: always inspect and adapt! This topic will go on for sure...

Personal Taskboard: Evolution to Kanban

A few weeks ago I setup a personal taskboard at the wall next to my desk. It had three lanes like a Scrum task board: "open", "in progress", and "done". After one day there were lots of things in progress and two tasks were done already:

The major problem was the number of tasks in progress. There were just too many things ongoing so that control could easily get lost. Fortunately things were sorted out a few days later. Lots of things done and few things in progress:

After a while I recognized the repeating problem of too many thing in progress. After a short personal retrospective I decided to improve my focus on the "in progress" lane. It seemed obvious to limit the number of things to work on in parallel. I splitted the "in progress" lane in two parts:
a) an "on hold / wait" part for all the things that have been started but need external help
b) a "working on" part with focus on all the things in progress. This part now is a Kanban box with a limit of two tasks.

The positive effects of this change appeared instantly: things got their focus on the essence! Tasks were done in a much more sustaining pace than before.

I am curious about the next improvements of my personal task board. Let's see what my next retrospectives will expose.