So many things to do, so little time! how can I organize all this?
I am a Product Owner by day, working at Mercedes-Benz.io, so I should have got this covered from the start.
I did.
I created a Trello board, and been updating it since the ideas started to flow.
A Trello Board is a great way to maintain your work, based on a concept called Kanban. This way of work originated in Toyota, and was simply based on lining up all the necessary activities to accomplish a task, and order them in todo, doing, done columns.
This allows for anyone, with just a look of the board, to know exactly where a “task” is parked and what needs to be done afterwards. It allows also, when some one completes a task, to pick up the next one and be positively assured that no one else will be doing it, avoiding waste and duplication.
So… what do I need to buy? what tools should I have? what should be the order of doing stuff? all these were necessary informations for every task…
So I created a task template…
…and from then I just listed what I wanted to do, tools required, perishables required, links to page of the service manual, or youtube videos, teaching how to do it, for every single task.
Below an example for the “Remove KCA(1)” task
Then, as soon as you have all necessary tools and parts for a task, you can move it to Ready to Build.
Cool thing about Trello is the possibility to apply “tags” that help, even visually to cluster tasks, for easier programming. For instance in the picture above, you can verify that I added the orange: “Attention, No oil in engine”.
By applying that same tag to the tasks that need a dry engine, allows me to on the fly group the tasks together to do them all in one fell swoop!
The last advantage of the trello board is that you can create a open trello board and share it with everyone in a team, or simply by posting a link wherever you want, so everyone can follow up in your project.
I know, I know… it makes it feel like work. It does, but as I don’t run a service shop fully tooled and prepared for doing this kind of intervention on a blink of an eye, allows me to be “more” prepared and ready with every tools and consumables that I can think before hand.
And that will save me from being constantly nagging someone or wasting time to go shopping for duct-tape and WD40.
Hope this helps someone!