Part 1 - Learning kanban

1 Team Kanbaneros gets started

Take Scrum or Rational Unified Process (RUP) , for example; they prescribe what roles you should have, what meetings you should run, even how you should run them, and so on. Kanban, on the other hand, starts where you are, helps you understand your current situation, and helps you identify the next step to improve it.

Visualizing work

• Makes hidden work apparent

  • Can be as easy as a sticky for each work item

• Helps you see:

  • Who’s working on what
  • What you’re working on
  • How much is going on
• Visible work radiates information to people seeing it

They decided to start the workflow when the work was registered in JIRA and to end it when the work was in production.

When you visualize your pain and gather data about it, it’s much easier to get the stakeholders’ and other teams’ understanding. It’s not you nagging, it’s data.

Map your workflow to the board

• Identify all the stages, from work entering to work leaving the team

• Don’t strive for perfection

  • Inspect and adapt
• Work isn’t done until it’s producing value to the customer

• With a visualized workflow you can see:

  • Status of work
  • Potential problems such as work not progressing and piling up in a stage

Any short description that reminds you of what you’re doing will do. It’s good if it’s apparent what the item is about without having to get up close to the board and read for a while

We want the board and everything on it to radiate information to us. That information will tell us how our work works so that we can learn from it. The real gain isn’t seeing the status of each work item, great as that is. The real gain is to help us make decisions and to improve our process as we learn from how it works.

What goes on the card?

• From the card you should:

  • See the status of the work item
  • Be able to form a decision about what to do next with it

• Common attributes are:

  • Description of the work item
  • ID in electronic systems
  • Deadlines
  • Who’s working on the item
  • Type of work (bug or normal, for example)

to measure the total lead time, the time it takes from start to finish for the work to flow through our workflow,

What we’ve shown you with this simple exercise is that when you decrease the number of concurrent or simultaneous ongoing work items, the lead time decreases,

Notice that we’re doing the same amount of work, but working in a different way—with smaller batches, with less work in process at the same time

Work in process (WIP) is the number of work items you have going at the same time. Less work in process leads to quicker flow through your process: shorter lead time.

with less work in process, will both give you better total speed and let you become more agile, because you can deliver the small, important stuff first.

Limit work in process

• Strive to work with fewer items at the same time
• Smaller batches means shorter lead times
• Resource efficiency decreases while flow efficiency increases
• Games/simulations like Pass the Pennies can be a great way to teach people abstract concepts

you could all agree to stop starting and start finishing.

When stuff starts to come out of your system on a regular basis, the demand for accurate estimates and predictions will diminish, in our experience. Second, you won’t feel swamped with work because you now have a limit on how many things you’ll work on at the same time. If someone wants to add a new work item, they’ll have to also decide what gets taken out.

You need to balance those two against each other: fast flow versus people having work to work on. You want a low work-in-process limit, but probably not a limit of ‘one,’

It’s not that important where the flow slows down or stops. The important thing is what you do about it.

The WIP limit isn’t a strict rule; it’s a trigger for discussions.

Limit your work in process

• Start with: stop starting and start finishing
• Limiting WIP will surface improvement opportunities
• Acting on them leads to better flow
• There’s no one right WIP limit for a team

• A lower WIP is generally better. As a rule of thumb:

  • Too-high WIP leaves work idle
  • Too-low WIP leaves people idle
• WIP limits are not rules—they are triggers for discussions

An expedite item should only be used for urgent cases and is not to be used as a fast lane to cheat the system. You’ll settle on a limit for how many expedite items you allow per month

Expedite lane

• Common way to handle special cases

  • Such as work that is urgent
• Often visualized as a separate lane on the board

• Policies around that lane might be:

  • Only one item can be in the lane at the time
  • Max one expedite item per week
  • Don’t count the expedite lane against the WIP limit

These are metrics by you, for you, to help you to find areas in which to improve

With the board in place, you’ve set yourselves up to easily track at least two simple and powerful metrics: lead time and throughput.

Lead time is the time it takes for a work item to go from start to finish—from the first column to the last.

Starting to track lead times can be as simple as writing down the date of the sticky as it enters the Todo column and then writing down the date when it enters In Production. Plot that out in a simple diagram, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what your average lead time is.

Throughput, the rate at which you complete work, is even easier to track. In Production Count the number of items you finish for a given period of time

Metrics

• There to help the team improve
• Let the team choose their own metrics; do not use them for performance review

• Two common and useful metrics are:

  • Lead time—the time for the whole workflow
  • Throughput—how much or how many work items you complete over a period of time

Part 2 - Understanding kanban

2 Kanban principles

When working with this principle, you can find inspiration in Lean Thinking to help your work flow more smoothly by removing waste in your process. You can also take a look at the Theory of Constraints 3 and identify, exploit, and alleviate the bottlenecks in your system.

1. Visualize
2. Limit work in process
3. Manage flow
4. Make process policies explicit - With explicit policies, you can start to have discussions around your process that are based on objective data instead of on what you think, feel, and have anecdotal evidence for.
5. Implement feedback loops - This practice puts a focus on getting feedback from your process: for example, in what is called an operations review, which is a kind of retrospective for the process itself.
6. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally (using models and the scientific method) - This practice encourages you to use models such as the Theory of Constraints or Lean to push your team toward further improvements.

3 Visualizing your work

When Japanese use the term visualization, or mieruka in Japanese ( 見える化 ), they often mean not only presenting things in an easily understandable visual form, but also the goal of greater transparency and information sharing among employees and stakeholders in order to increase the organization’s effectiveness.

Remember that the policies are only that: policies—not rules that must be followed. They can, and should, be broken from time to time, but the decision to do so should be made intentionally and often with careful consideration from the whole team.

Information radiators

• Big, visible displays
• For you and other interested parties
• Keep it easy to update
• Keep it big
• Use it or lose it

Which criteria need to be met in order for me to move a work item to the next column?

4 Work items

First and foremost, you want the design and information on the card to facilitate decision making in the team.

the description needs to be terse, to the point, and easy for everyone on the team to understand.

in your mind, put “The one where” before the description on the card.

Deadlines are risk-management information and help the team prioritize and self-organize; you don’t want to miss seeing them, so make sure they’re clearly visible.

Although keeping a separate “parking lot” for blocked items might seem like a good idea, we advise against it. It’s basically the same thing as saying that it’s OK to be blocked—“Look, we even have a dedicated area on the board for it!”

o accomplish this, many teams attach another sticky on top of the blocked work item. This is a good idea because you also can write the reason why the item is blocked on the blocker sticky. In this way, you get not only a signal that the work is blocked, but also some information about why it’s blocked, which in turn helps the team focus on resolving the blockage.

These types can also be used to set up policies on how work should be treated, commonly referred to as classes of service

A progress indicator is a simple tool that helps you track this information and shows “how much done” the item is.

5 Work in process

It doesn’t mean you should do less work, but that you should do less work at the same time

Little’s law often comes up. The law is a mathematical proof by John D.C. Little that says that the more things you have going at the same time, the longer each thing will take

That’s exactly what you experience when doing context switching in knowledge work. You lose time and focus for every task you’re trying to keep in your head at the same time.

One study 2 showed that as much as 10% of your working time per project is lost to context switching.

The more quickly you can get feedback, the more quickly you can change a bad process into a slightly better one.

6 Limiting work in process

A lower WIP limit is generally better than a higher one because you want to limit the number of items you work on as much as possible.

If your WIP limit is too high, work will become idle.

With a WIP limit that is too low, people will become idle.

7 Managing flow