My Continuous Improvement: Personal Kanban – 4th Revision FAILED!

A couple of years ago, I read a blog post by Tim McMahon about his experience with using personal kanban to manage his work.  It inspired me to try my own.  The first one didn’t work as I mention here.

Then I tried again.  I had great success with the 2nd board.  I used it for a year and a half.

With a new role where I have multiple desks, I am constantly in different areas of the building.  I may not be back to my desk for several days or even a couple of weeks.  I wasn’t able to keep my board up and I had work to do written in several places.

I wanted to find an electronic kanban that would work for me.  I found one that worked well.  It was a computer only board.  I explain it more in this post here.

This new electronic kanban work well.  I could take a note or email myself on my phone with what needed to be on it and then transfer it when I got to my computer.  If I had my computer with my, I just added right then.

As a person always looking to eliminate waste, you can see where there was waste in emailing myself and then re-typing it for the kanban board.  A friend of mine recommended Trello for me to try.  It was web-based.  I was able to download an app to my phone which I could open and enter the work and not send myself emails to re-enter.

Everything looked great so I gave it a try for the last 3 months of last year.

It wasn’t hard to use.  It had plenty of features and it was setup very similar to the electronic kanban I was using.  For some reason, I couldn’t get the flow of it.  Trello was not working for me.  I tried for three months and I couldn’t get into the flow of using it and making my life easier to manage.

I have no idea why it didn’t click with me but it was a disaster.  I forgot some things that needed to be done.  I felt disorganized and stressed.

So, to start 2014 I am going back to my electronic kanban board on my computer and not using Trello.  I already feel more organized and less stressed since I switched back.

I’m not dismissing Trello yet.  I need to reflect as to why it wasn’t working for me.  Was it something truly with Trello?  Or did it have something to do with the enormous project I was on and I just couldn’t keep up with trying something new at the same time?

The important thing is to understand what was happening because maybe Trello can work for me and help me reduce my waste in maintaining my kanban board.

Learning is important and not just living with a change because we need to change.  The change needs to be given a fair chance and if it is failing then you can’t be scared to change back if necessary.

Does anyone else have any experiences with a change that totally failed?