Kanban & DIY

A few weeks ago my 11 year old daughter had a school project with two class mates that they were to complete over a 3 week period. They divided up the tasks between themselves and set to work. One week in and one of them was working on a task assigned to another kid. Another had nothing done. On the last week of the project there was a lot of late evenings rushing to get tasks completed.

During this period I told my daughter that they should manage the project using Kanban and set up a kanban board with all the project tasks, who they were assigned to, and assign each task into 3 buckets (To Do, In Progress, Done). She ignored me, project finished, and I thought my advice fell on deaf ears.

So this morning my daughter started to project manage one of my home DIY projects as she is unhappy with the slow progress I am making on various DIY jobs around the house. Lots of jobs started, half done but few fully finished. She got out a whiteboard, a set of post-its and started to create the kanban board above with the following task for me to do to complete the spare room:

• Install subfloor.
• Plasterboard wall.
• Skimcoat the walls.
• Install lighting.
• Electrical sockets.
• Heating.
• Hang new room door.
• Paint.
• Fit carpet or wooden floor.

So at the end of the day I had installed a new 18mm OSB subfloor in the spare room and moved this post-it to the 'Done' pile. The next post-it I took in hand was to fit some lighting in the room as this will allow me to work later on these shorter autumn days. I will be interested to see how this progresses over the next few weekends.