Kanban
With Kanban, you can manage work. It is a method to manage all types of professional services, also referred to as knowledge work.
Principles of Kanban
A good visualization is the key to effective collaboration and to identify improvement opportunities. Visualizing that work and the flow of that work greatly improves transparency.
It allows us to absorb and process a great deal of information in a short time. In addition, visualization supports cooperation, as everyone involved has the same picture.
Additionally , it helps to expose bottlenecks.
FACILITATOR
Material and guidelines to setup the Kanban board: As a preference use JIRA Kanban board where everyone can add cards. Ensure that everyone has access to the tool.
Encourage use of simple, clear column names – not every detail, just key steps (to avoid over-complicating the first board). Goal is to get comfortable visualizing work, not to have a perfect process design.
Kanban boards are the most common means of visualizing a Kanban system. Common to all boards is pulling work from left to right through the board: on the left, new work items enter the board. When they exit on the right, value is delivered to customers.
In a Kanban system, there is at least one clear commitment and delivery point as well as a representation of the permitted amount of work (Work in progress, WIP).
Work items can be of different types and sizes, from tasks to requirements.
Work items are typically displayed as post-its usually called cards or tickets.
The series of activities/steps these work items go through are referred to as workflow. The individual steps in the workflow are shown in columns.
The goal is to pull whenever work is available.
WIP (Work in Progress) states the number of work items in progress at a certain time.
Too much work-in-progress causes inefficiency and setting WIP limits can improve focus and throughput. Limiting the work that is allowed to enter the system is an important key to reducing delay and context switching which may result in poor timeliness, quality, and potentially waste. The aim is to create a balance between demand and capability over time.
FACILITATOR
Material and guidelines to setup the WIP per state: At the start of using KanBan agree with the team what should be the WIP maximum. Ensure that this WIP is respected in each KanBan Daily
FACILITATOR
Material and guidelines to setup the meetings: At the start of using KanBan agree with the team when is the daily, how long should it take (ideal is 15m). Agree how often it should perform a retrospective (ideal biweekly for one hour). Agree
