Kidz Kanban–Classes of Service

In my first Kidz Kanban post, I described how my 6 year old daughter and I established a Kanban board to visualize her weekend chore work.  Together, we learned 2 important things:

1. Visualizing your work can be powerful. It reduces ambiguity in our human interactions.
2. Using the language of your stakeholders provides better engagement and shared understanding.

The next weekend, we were working the items on the board, when my daughter makes a surprise announcement to the prioritized list of tasks.

“Dad I moved the “Clean basement” sticky to the top of the list so I can do it first. Is that ok…?” 

Me: Why do we need to do that first?

“Because Grandma is coming today and she is staying overnight.”

(Full disclosure, I don’t make a habit of stowing my mother-in-law in the basement when she visits. We have a comfortably finished basement where we house a guest bedroom and bathroom.)

My 6 year old made a quick observation when surveying her initial task list. She didn’t know definitively if the current priority would be a problem. But she intuitively knew we were at risk of not having the guest space in the basement ready for grandma's visit.

So I asked my daughter if she thought we should show that work differently.  I suggested we use an alternate color sticky note--in this case green.

My daughter decided to complete the green sticky notes first, and finish the remaining yellow notes last.

The more astute readers, (maybe everyone) of this blog will note that we haven't done much here other than an overly elaborate prioritization scheme.  Couldn't we accomplish the same effect by just re-ordering our sticky notes in the "Daddy Says" column without changing colors?  We could do that, but it doesn't really tell the whole story.

My daughter and I continued our conversation about the green ticket.  I asked if the basement cleaning needed to occur immediately.

Me: When will Grandma really need to use the basement?

"Well, not until she needs to go to bed tonight" 

Me: Could we wait until just before she goes to bed before we clean?

"Yeah, we could...... but I still want to clean it right now."

This exchange demonstrated that our green sticky note usage could mean more than just a simple change in priority. Even though my daughter decided to work the green notes first, she had the option to defer that commitment until later.  This is a subtle, but very important distinction from a simple priority list. By ignoring the priority approach, we open up new possibilities.  My daughter could choose to "check for ripe tomatoes" or "clean her bedroom" and tap new possibilities (value). For example, we could have fresh tomatoes in time for lunch with Grandma while we defer the basement cleaning until the afternoon.

Software teams that practice Kanban often use a similar approach called Classes of Service.  A good blog post is found here. I first learned about Classes of Service from the original Kanbaner, David Anderson, and he describes his approach in his book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business. 

This example would be considered a Fixed Delivery Date Class of Service. Typically, a due date would be visible on the card.  In my daughter's example, she would need a Fixed Delivery Time on her sticky note. And since we are visualizing our fixed delivery date stickies on the same board as our standard class of service, we can make instant judgments about which items to work at various points in time.

My daughter ultimately decided against deferring the fixed date work item. That's ok. I have some work to do with her, but hey, she's only in the 1st grade. What's interesting though is how a 1st grader can show more agility than a highly-paid team of professional grade software folks--even the "Agile" ones.

Our simple weekend task board has one big advantage over many corporate software team task boards.  We don't batch our work in an arbitrary fashion. How many software professionals have to tell customers "no" or provide few alternative work paths because:

• "We have to stick with our project plan so we can show we are successfully executing."
• "We can't break our iteration for this, it will mess up our velocity metric."
• "We committed to delivering this batch of stories by next Thursday."

I know I've experienced this in the past. If your struggling with something similar to this, you may want to consider offering Classes of Service to your customer for more nuanced team decision making.