Kanban Boards

Kanban Boards: A Kanban Board is a key Kanban tool for workflow visualization of tasks in a Project. This technique helps in understanding better our processes and getting an understanding of overall work progress.

Background

SCRUM is typically in a scenario where there is the predictability of scope at least till the next couple of Sprints or the upcoming release. But what happens in an unpredictable environment. Production support teams for example never know what waits for them in the current day. If SCRUM doesn’t fit such scenarios, what does? The answer is Kanban.

Video: Kanban Boards

Types of Kanban Boards

The work of all Kanban teams revolves around a Kanban board, a tool used to visualize work and optimize the flow of the work among the team

• Physical board
• Digital board

Elements of Kanban Boards

One of the first things you’ll notice about a Kanban board is the visual cards (stickies, tickets, or otherwise). Kanban teams write all of their projects and work items onto cards, usually one per card. For agile teams, each card could encapsulate one user story.

Visual Signals

Once on the board, these visual signals help teammates and stakeholders quickly understand what the team is working on. Kanban teams often have a backlog for their board. This is where customers and teammates put ideas for projects that the team can pick up when they are ready. The commitment point is the moment when an idea is picked up by the team and work starts on the project.

Kanban Boards: Columns & WIP

Another hallmark of the Kanban board is the columns. Each column represents a specific activity that together composes a “workflow”. Slide Cards flow through the workflow until completion.

WIP limits are the maximum number of cards that can be in one column at any given time. A column with a WIP limit of three cannot have more than three cards in it. Work In Progress (WIP) limits set the maximum amount of work that can exist in each status of a workflow. Limiting the amount of work in progress makes it easier to identify inefficiency in a team’s workflow.

WIP Limit Guidelines

The delivery point is the end of a Kanban team’s workflow. For most teams, the delivery point is when the product or service is in the hands of the customer. The team’s goal is to take cards from the commitment point to the delivery point as fast as possible

Size Consistently

When breaking down requirements and user stories, it’s important to keep individual tasks to no more than 8 hours of work. Doing so increases the team’s ability to estimate confidently, and it helps prevent bottlenecks. Nothing slows down a team and aggravates WIP limits like a big work item clogging up the pipeline.

WIP Limits with Team Skills

If your team has specialists on the skill, work in progress limits may differ when the specialist is involved. Create a status specific for the specialist’s work. If bottlenecks occur in that status, use the opportunity to educate other team members to add additional capacity for the specialist’s skill sets and increase flow across the entire team.

Idleness

When a team member has some downtime, encourage them to help an upstream or downstream team member. They’ll contribute to the overall productivity of the team, and learn something along the way

Engineering Culture

Work in progress limits does not mean developers need to rush through work to avoid work overload in a particular status. They are meant to support solid agile engineering practices that protect the quality of the product and the health of the code base.