Kanban–Visualize Workflow: Learning and Results

I recently introduced the Kanban method to several people in an established tech company as part of a training class. The leaders of the Delta development team were keen to get started right away. I encouraged them to create a team kanban board to visualize their workflow.

A couple of weeks later, I had an opportunity to observe Delta team's daily stand up meeting and listen to what they had learned. They had their kanban board up with columns and queues, done defined, and current product work on the board.

Learning and Results

Really helps those outside the team see what is going on. This makes visible the effort wasted when work is pulled in flight. This was a big concern for the team who had spent time grooming stories for a feature only to have the feature replaced or stripped down just before engineering. The company lives in a competitive, volatile market space. Product managers strive to ensure their product remains cutting edge. So Delta team and the business need to figure a way to manage productively in this environment. I'm not sure anything has changed yet but at least the team feels better now that they have a way to show the impact. Once they have reduced the lead time, Product Management can wait to prioritize features (makes product management happy) and teams can finish features quickly before priorities change (makes team happy).

Management and internal customers respect the process. This result was actually from the operations group who had created their board after Kanban training they attended several months ago. Prior to the kanban board, the ops team was interrupted frequently for "urgent" work. The kanban board stopped this behavior completely according to the ops manager. Stakeholders could see that people were busy working on important items and had a voice in prioritizing the backlog. Just using a kanban board to visualize the work can have an impact of organizational behavior.

Really helps the team see what is going on. The board makes visible progress and team priorities. The team and business analyst in particular do not feel as desperately rushed when a new feature is introduced at the last moment. It will still be a scramble, but instead of feeling like the whole feature must be groomed, stories are groomed and pulled by engineering. Other stories can be elaborated and groomed while engineering is working on ready stories. Delta is trying daily grooming instead of a rushing to groom the backlog just before sprint planning. This adds flexibility and reduces chaos.

Makes visible the backlog items that are not flowing. Delta team marks cards with dots to show how many days a card stays in each column. They also tag cards that are blocked. Problems and delay is apparent.

It takes just minutes a day to maintain the board.

I made a few suggestion to establish goals and work in progress limits. I'm very interested to visit Delta team again in a couple of weeks to hear what else they have learned.