Two nights ago I had a great discussion with my son, Justice Berteig, about how we have been managing to do house cleaning every week.  We have been using a very basic Kanban system.  I have created about 100 stickies each of which has a basic cleaning task such as “tidy the kitchen counters” or “vacuum the office floor” or “clean the powder room toilet”.  If we do all of the tasks, it represents a fairly complete cleaning of the whole house.  Every Saturday morning, all six of us (myself, my wife and our four kids) choose one task at a time and put the sticky for that task in the “In Progress” column.  When we finish a task, we move it to the “Done” column.  When all the tasks are done, we all are finished.  We reuse the stickies each week.  Sometimes if we want to do a quick clean, we won’t put out all of the stickies.

It works well in one specific way: everything gets done!

But Justice was complaining about the system because he works a lot harder and one of my younger kids has admitted to doing less than she could… because she can get away with it with this system.

Last week we tried a modified system where each person has a task allocation.  For example, Justice had an allocation of 25 tasks.  Our younger daughter had an allocation of just 5 tasks.  We then took turns to choose one task at a time (although there were a lot of exceptions to this) until all the tasks are pre-allocated (similar to how teams used to do Sprint Planning).  But, although some people finished all their tasks, not everyone did and so there were a number of things left over that never got finished.

In other words, we stopped using a Kanban system, and we stopped reaching the overall goal of a clean house.

So Justice and I had a long conversation about this problem.  In the interests of continuous improvement and experimentation, I didn’t just force the issue back to the old Kanban system.  Instead we decided to try the following changes:

1. Limit the tasks to only those in common areas.  Private areas such as bedrooms would be taken off the master list.
2. Each task would get an estimate from a scale of 1 to 3 to represent their relative difficulty.  We will talk as a family about the estimates and maybe use a simplified “bucket system“.
3. Now, instead of an allocation of a specific number of tasks, the allocation would be for a total amount of effort.  We agreed that our youngest would get a smaller allocation still, but she could take any number of tasks to fill it up.
4. We also agreed to be more disciplined about taking turns to choose tasks.

I’m going to add one more thing which is to do a specific retrospective on how it worked to see if we can come up with further improvements.  I have to admit that I hope we go back to the Kanban approach!!!

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