1The Minimum Viable Product concept comes from Eric Reis’s excellent book The Lean Startup. The key to a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is that all three of those words is important. You can probably see how this simple kanban board you just built is indeed minimal. What really separates an MVP from other ways of creating new things is that it must be Viable — it is a thing you can actually use to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. It is not a single tire you hope to put on to a fancier car someday but that can’t transport you on its own, it is a simple skateboard that will get you where you want to go. And it is a Product, which I’ll distinguish from a Concept. It is a tangible thing that you (and others) can wrap your head around, evaluate, and formulate some actionable opinions about. ↩

2As you start with Kanban (and Agile methodologies in general) I’d say more frequent retrospectives are better. Every week or two isn’t too often at first. Once you get the hang of it, you may or may not want to stretch them out over time. I strongly recommend doing them at least quarterly.↩

3Some early Agile teams adopted the cathartic practice of ripping up each kanban card once it reached “Done” and the team agreed that it was truly finished. This supported the notion that a completed task-set should be “done done,” and should not be around to tempt additional work.↩

4The analogy of factory flow to a river’s flow originates with Taichii Ohno, regarded by many as the father of Lean manufacturing.↩

5In Lean parlance, Waste is any activity that doesn’t add Value to your product or service (Value being measured from the perspective of your Customer). “Waiting” is traditionally one of the Seven Wastes of Lean (some people count eight), but as I said above there is good waiting and bad waiting. Failure to engage in good waiting (i.e. waiting until a task is truly Ready for your work) will inevitably lead to some of the other Wastes, namely Pre-processing and Re-work. Bad waiting comes when the task is Ready, but you, for some reason, are not. Expect more on Waste in Chapter 7.↩

6Many people have a funny relationship with deadlines where once the due-date has past, we actually let up on our efforts to finish since we feel like we’ve already lost. An elapsed time, however continues to increase pressure to get it that thing taken care of.↩

7Yes, there can be parts of legal practices where the value is in the experience. Take an initial consultation on a divorce, or a visit in jail from your defense attorney. For events like those, there is tremendous value in the lawyer’s ability to help a client to make sense of a complex situation, and to feel the emotional relief that comes from having an experienced advocate on your side. I’m not going to address that part of legal practice in this book (for the most part) because it isn’t terribly process-intensive. If anything, my concern is to help you get all the process-oriented stuff flowing through your practice more smoothly so that you can spend more time delivering valuable experiences like these.↩

8and you intend to do so before you start working on other items in your “To Do” column. ↩

9If you still don’t believe me, try this exercise. Your job is to accomplish three tasks: writing 1 to 10 in Arabic numerals, writing 1 to 10 in Roman numerals, and writing the first 10 letters of the alphabet. Grab a piece of paper and divide it into three columns, one for each task. You also need a timer (your smartphone probably has one). You’re going to do this at least twice. In round one, you must complete all the “ones” before you move on to the “twos.” So your sequence will go “1,” “I,” “A;” “2,” “II,” “B,” and so on. Start the timer when you’re ready and go to it. When you’re done, note your time and flip the paper over to make three columns again. Now repeat the exercise, but this time you must finish one column before you move on to the next, so you’ll write 1-10 in Arabic numbers, then in Roman, then in letters. Compare your times and call me a liar if you weren’t faster the second time (you can tweet it to me at @jegrant3). And if you think your speed on round 2 is because you got better at Roman numerals, go back and do round one again to double check.↩

10This is not necessarily an indictment of hourly billing. While many people criticize hourly billing as it is currently practiced in service industries, I believe that Kanban and other Agile project management methods can support a relationship where hourly billing is defensible and even preferable to provider and client alike. That said, hourly billing as practiced by lawyers with inefficient and opaque processes is rightfully suspect.↩

11One advantage that service providers (like lawyers) have is that we don’t need to wait until everything is done to start delivering incremental value to our customers. We can deliver knowledge and insight and outputs (letters, filings, etc) that will help the client advance her understanding of status on a particular matter, and we can and should expect the client to compensate us for that incremental value. But that still doesn’t mean that our costs for delivering the value (our time) is the best proxy for that value in our customer’s eyes. The customer’s perception of value will naturally flow from her understanding of the benefits of the work, not her lawyer’s calculation of its costs.↩