ingvald

Kanban Core Concepts

• Visualize work; items, process/ flow, policies
• Limit work-in-progress (WIP), but don’t be too ambitious at first

Basic Kanban is a lightweight framework for change management.
Starting with the core concepts on top of your present process should meet little resistance, at least when coupled with focus on improving quality.

Btw, I talked at a lokal meetup earlier this year (slides here), mostly on the core concepts – why they work and how to start.

A few Kanban Practices

• Flow; encourage, cultivate, transform towards
• Classes of Service (CoS); visualize and track different types of work, with different demands on them
• Gradually limit WIP to improve flow and to uncover your next improvement opportunity
• Cadence; regular rythm of things like backlog replenishment and deployment, separate from development
• Metrics; to manage flow over time
• Pull; instead of mostly work with deadlines
• Slack, swarming – doing it consciously

There’s more, but this illustrates the relation between the core concepts and a set of recommended practices.

You’re likely to start with a simple version of some practices, f.ex. the work types (CoS) critical items, work with deadlines, bugs. More practices can be utilized as your organization matures, and more sofisticated use of practices, like setting different target lead times for different CoS, f.ex. 50% of bugs should be fixed within a week.

(Re-posted from notes to self.)

Update after “conversation” with @pawelbrodzinski: Buy-in from management and whole organization is preferable, but team buy-in is enough and necessary, in my opinion.

I think it’s important to just get started, improving step by step, and team buy-in and the Core Concepts are enough to do that.

Monday February 7 I talked about Kanban at Trondheim XP & Agile Meetup.

I think it went well, even if I made a few presenter mistakes, based on feedback and the great questions and discussions.

Here’s the presentation with a few adjustments, like a few additional links for further reading.

On Monday, February 7, I’m talking about Kanban at Trondheim XP & Agile Meetup.

2. I’ll follow through on subtopics.  F.ex. on visualization, I ended up mentioning the banal fact that a task board is an example of visualization, when I really wanted to say something about a team and it’s context. F.ex. how a task board that’s visible for everyone promotes a shared mental model between people both in the team and among the stakeholders, and therefore enables much more effective thinking and communication when developing software.