Modus institute courses

Too often, we find ourselves overwhelmed with our workload. This creates painful decisions, conflicts with stakeholders, and professional angst as we grapple with questions like:

What is the right thing to do right now? Should I be working alone or collaborating? What is everyone else doing? There are so many problems, what should I focus on?

We all have a dire need for clarity.

We could respond to this with more meetings, working longer hours, or even just giving up…

Or…

We could take control, visualize and share our work, finish the work at hand before we start something else, completing our work at the right time and with confidence.

This is possible; professionals and teams are doing it globally every day.

We simply need to reduce the fear that comes from being overwhelmed by having too much to do. When we can see our work, we can understand it. When we understand the work, we gain the clarity we need to make thoughtful choices about what the next right thing to do is. When we have that agency, we can communicate better with the people who depend on us. We owe ourselves and our colleagues this much.

Personal Kanban, a system that visualizes work and stops us from overcommitting has helped professionals in every industry, from the United Nations, to the US Patent and Trade Office, to Turner Construction to Spotify to San Francisco Health Plan to the World Bank, to see their work, share understanding, and collaborate with confidence.

• How to visualize your work?
• How you and your team can see your work and communicate needs in real time?
• How to focus and finish with quality?
• How to manage overload?
• How to plan and prioritize in quickly shifting environments?
• How to communicate existing commitment when others come pouring in?

Each week you will be asked to watch a series of video lessons covering Personal Kanban topics. After you’ve watched the videos you will have a short assignments to complete that will help you get up and running using Personal Kanban. Then we will set up calls where you, your classmates and your instructor will discuss key points from the videos and how people are progressing with making Personal Kanban work for you.

• No more than 18 students (intimate and directed)
• Uses video and text from the popular Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute. 
• Zoom sessions provide communication, collaboration, and mutual learning (you build a community).
• You will receive the new Personal Kanban Level 2 Practitioner Certification for taking the course.

As an Accredited Kanban Trainer, I attended Sally's first Personal Kanban training out of curiosity. I really enjoyed the good conversations Sally let happen about all things not only Kanban - one thing I love about Kanban - it sparks meaningful conversations. The course offers a lot of inspiration about how to organise your personal work, how to re-prioritize based on real-time information instead of stack-ranking. The homework was just as meaningful, with important insights into the human psyche, and it was fun to experiment setting up our own personal Kanban boards in the course of the training. Thanks Sally! - Silke

Sally's knowledge of Kanban is beyond theory and stretches into application. She not only teacher Kanban, she lives it! Highly relevant, application and when stuck, she's able to provide practical and relevant advice. - Tze

"Like many agile coaches I thought I knew kanban well enough.  This course opened my eyes to multiple ways of thinking about and using kanban, many of which I now use daily.  In particular as someone who is reliant on kanban for managing my day-to-day activities it is helped ease my self-imposed pressure on task completion and focus more on what is important.  I'd recommend this course to anyone who could do with a fresh perspective on getting work done."  Ross MacIntyre, Organisational Consultant.

You can't manage what you can't see.

You can't align what you can't see.

Your team can map their work, understand their collaborations, and see immediate improvement.

Value Stream Mapping is a quick, effective tool to get and keep everyone informed about how, why, and when we work. 

See the work your team does, who they collaborate with, where things break down, and where you can fix things right now. We take the Value Stream mapping basic Lean tool, and extend it for your team's work. We emphasize how the people on your team work together and with other teams to get work done. We look to remove the things that slow work down, and the things that knock your team off its game. Dependencies, impediments, changes in priority, bureaucracy, poorly defined work, estimation or lack of estimation, assumptions of how work is handed out... Agile methodologies and Lean manufacturing both need this tool taught the Modus Way.

Every team is built on assumptions. When you get a team together to map their value stream, they will talk for days about how they work. They will be surprised. Every team will immediately find ways to work better. Every...single...time.

We want to understand our work and improve. Mapping our work together, seeing what is not working, and looking for ways to build new relationships, is a powerful moment that gets teams back on track.

Do not treat your VSM alignment exercise as a one-and-done. Improvement doesn't just happen and is complete, it needs to be maintained and revisited. For a professional, improvement is the job.