Tomorrow will be my first day in my new home office. For the last year and a half, I have been working from the couch, coffee shops, and the occasional co-working facility. As I picture how I will keep track of all of my projects in a visual representation on my wall, I thought about utilizing Agile, Scrum, Waterfall or Kanban. Kanban, which is Japanese for “visual sign” or “card,” won out of the four as a base for how I wanted to set up the board in my office. The change that I decided to make to traditional Kanban is that I will set up the board with the swim lanes matching my good friend Jason Scott Montoya’s IDEMA system.
The following paragraphs in burgundy are taken directly from the Medium channel for IDEMA.
An Introduction To IDEMA
IDEMA (Ideate > Discover > Execute > Maintain > Audit) is a problem-solving structure that helps organize business and life. It guides the creation process for making a living blueprint for your project, department, company or life.
It was conceived by Jason Montoya, Len Wikberg and Beth Coetzee in a desperate attempt to keep a good project manager at Noodlehead Marketing as we explored the lifecycle of projects.
The Benefits Of IDEMA
- Operating within the IDEMA framework gives us context for ideas and activities.
- It causes us to think about how to sustain ideas before bringing them to life.
- IDEMA adds enough tension to refine ideas and projects, but minimizes friction for moving it forward.
- It helps us get the right people in the right places doing the right actions.
- IDEMA is a framework to organize life & business in a spreadsheet, Trello, Airtable, Basecamp, or any other preferred tool.
With the provided framework as creative commons, we encourage you take the system and add more details, steps, & sub-processes.
Keep it simple or make it complex, the decision is yours.
So What Is The IDEMA Framework?
Every idea has a place. Where does it now belong?
- Ideate. Capture Our Idea.
- Discover. Establish Intentions & Plan to Sustain.
- Execute. Start, Finish & Prepare to Maintain.
- Maintain. Sustain Our Idea.
- Audit. Determine Our Assessed Idea’s Fate.
Challenge & Commit To Our Idea Before Moving From One Stage To The Next.
I decided to use IDEMA because:
- It was created by someone I know, love, and support.
- My entire world is nothing but ideas. I don’t develop software, I deal in ideas.
- It follows a cycle that allows for the final phase of Audit to generate new ideas
- My weakness in the stages is #4 – Maintain. I want to get stronger at this and I want to make maintain the focus of my new habits as I move into my new home office.
I will post a part two to this post when I have the Kanban board with the IDEMA swim lanes set up and running. Until then, wish me luck!
IDEMA image by Jason Montoya
