One of the complicated things about real estate investing is keeping track of all your projects and what stage they are at. Not only that, but we need to know who’s providing the money, when we owe payments, who is working on the houses, and what’s coming next.
We’ve tried lots of ways of organizing, mostly involving spreadsheets (we mainly being Lee). It takes a lot of work and thought.
I get frustrated by how hard it can be, because I happen to work for a company that sells really nice products that let you build project schedules, create kanban boards, make assignments, and all those handy things. But, we can’t afford even the small business version of Projectplace. I do highly recommend it if you have a slightly larger small business or a big ole enterprise. We also have a product called LeanKit that works great for Agile projects and revolves around its kanban features. Too bad I can’t use it at THIS job!
So, Lee decided to make our own big kanban board,* so we can all look at it and see at a glance where we are in our projects. We happen to have a large, empty office at the moment (the former minister office that isn’t cleaned out yet), so Lee and Mike (who is handy with tools and also creative) started to work on a prototype.
*What’s a Kanban Board?
A Kanban board is one of the tools that can be used to implement Kanban to manage work at a personal or organizational level. Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. Wikipedia
Here’s a great description of how kanban boards are used, from Planview, where I happen to work during the week.
Lee likes this system, because he gets to use colored paper and print things out. He loves printing things out. Mike is interested, because he plans to build us a board to do this with, rather than use the wall.
Stay tuned for reports on our project progress board as it makes its own progress. Let’s see how well we reinvent the wheel!
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