Kanban

Kanban in Action

by Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sunden  · 17 Mar 2014

of Contents Copyright Brief Table of Contents Table of Contents Foreword Preface About this Book About the Authors About the Cover Illustration Acknowledgments 1. Learning kanban Chapter 1. Team Kanbaneros gets started 1.1. Introductions 1.2. The board 1.3. Mapping the workflow 1.4. Work items 1.5. Pass

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1.6. Work in process 1.7. Expedite items 1.8. Metrics 1.9. The sendoff 1.10. Summary 2. Understanding kanban Chapter 2. Kanban principles 2.1. The principles of kanban 2.2. Get started right away 2.3. Summary Chapter 3. Visualizing your work 3.1. Making policies explicit 3.1

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work, we build a shared understanding of it. Then we can do away with messy process conventions that have plagued software development for years. The kanban board can become a simple single point that lets anyone come and understand the current state of the project. This means software teams can finally

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on faith-based approaches like “How is Scrum telling us how to solve this?” The next year, I participated in David J. Anderson’s first kanban coaching workshop ever (now called Advanced Master Class) in London, together with, among others, experienced practitioners like Rachel Davies, David P. Joyce, and Martine

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Reinertsen, Alan Shalloway, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Håkan Forss, Måns Sandström, Eric Willeke, Jabe Bloom, Mike Burrows, Dennis Stevens, and all the folks at the Kanban Leadership Retreat. We’ve learned a lot and had a great time with the Stockholm Lean Coffee bunch, including Håkan Forss and all the other

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Frank grew impatient now. “Where do we start?” “We understand that you’re eager to get started,” Joakim answered. “But you should also understand that kanban is a bit different from other methods. Take Scrum or Rational Unified Process (RUP), for example; they prescribe what roles you should have, what meetings

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It could be the start of a transformation that can ultimately reach the entire company, in an evolutionary way. Soon you’ll find yourself teaching kanban to others and being involved in change management on an organization-wide scale. You can read about this in chapter 13. Three principles? I thought

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in line with the principles of Lean and continuous-improvement thinking. The three basic principles we describe in this section make up the foundation that kanban is based on. Recently, David J. Anderson and others have extended the three basic principles to five properties and later six practices; these are

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toward further improvements. That’s three more practices added to the principles we’ve talked about so far. Note that this holds true for the Kanban Method of “incremental, evolutionary change for technology development/operations organizations,” and in that context the last three practices are important. As you probably have

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respect current roles, responsibilities, and job titles. And recently a fourth principle was added: Leadership at all levels in the organization. During our time as kanban practitioners, the principles we talk about have become practices, the practices have gone from three to five to six, the term principles has been redefined

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Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer (McGraw Hill, 2003, http://amzn.com/0071392319). To us, this is the essence of the principle “Visualize” in kanban: to make all necessary information visible when people need it, enabling effective collaboration and improvement through understanding how the work works. To achieve this with

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teamwork, emotional and subjective discussions of problems, and so on. If you can make these policies explicit—for example, through visualizing your workflow on a kanban board and talking about what the different steps mean—the inconsistencies have to be dealt with and the conflicts can be resolved. Once the policies

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to visualize and how. To us, visualizing the work and making policies explicit are inseparable; but because visualization can be more narrowly interpreted, the official kanban definition has “Make process policies explicit” as one of its six core practices, along with “Visualize.” As you’ll see throughout the book, a

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means making information visible that previously wasn’t, making implicit knowledge and policies explicit, and, in doing so, resolving inconsistencies and conflicts that surface. The kanban board is a great way to visualize your workflow and share information about priorities, who’s working on what, the progress of individual work items

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into the trap of not setting a WIP limit at all! This is one of the most common mistakes we see in teams starting with kanban. Kanban involves three simple principles; don’t remove one of them too soon. The risk is that you’ll end up with a board flooded with

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chapter. Chapter 7. Managing flow This chapter covers What continuous flow is and why you want it Eliminating waste to achieve flow Managing flow with kanban Using daily standups to help the work flow Choosing what to work on next Managing bottlenecks using the Theory of Constraints Flow, or rather one

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a number of other common classes of service. Among the most widespread are the classes of service that David J. Anderson describes in his book Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business (Blue Hole Press, 2010): Expedite (which we call Urgent), Fixed Delivery Date, Intangible, and Regular (Anderson uses

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next chapter, we’ll take a look at another concept that is important for any process: planning and estimating. How does planning go together with kanban? Are estimates still important? Are there some common ways of estimating? Chapter 9. Planning and estimating This chapter covers Planning, scheduling, and ways to

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planning sessions to break down work, keep doing retrospectives to improve, and keep doing demonstrations for your stakeholders at suitable cadences. 9.5. Planning the kanban way: less pain, more gain In this section, we want to step back and take some time to ponder why you’re planning and estimating

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Cadence is the natural rhythm or heartbeat found in your process. In iteration-based processes, there are natural cadences when iterations start and stop. With kanban you can have the cadences you see fit for activities: reviewing, planning, demonstration, and retrospectives. You don’t have to tie it to the

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flow of your work. Finally, we stepped back and pondered the need for plans and estimates: Teams that use kanban see the need for detailed plans decreasing with the tightening of feedback loops. Customers don’t want plans and estimates; they want business capabilities. Estimating

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organization. It’s the respect for people—respecting, developing, and encouraging everyone in the organization—that makes this possible. With its roots in Lean thinking, kanban is all about continuous improvement and respect for people. Visualizing the work is an easy but effective way of enabling self-organized improvement work. Limiting

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you know the origin of it, is through an example. In this section, we’ll introduce the three katas, or improvement dialogues, that make up Kanban Kata: Daily Kata— A way to start including improvement work in your daily meetings Improvement Kata— A formalized way to improve your process Coaching Kata

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your next hypothesis. There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. R. Buckminster Fuller The next secret to why Kanban Kata works is that it takes small steps. You’re trying to improve from your current condition toward an improved target condition. The road toward

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different katas. They help you create new habits, a new mindset of continuous learning and improvement. That’s where the real gain is in using Kanban Kata: creating habits, a mindset, throughout the organization, of making small, small improvements, every day. 10.4. Summary This chapter talked about process improvement

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and common improvement practices: Continuous improvement and respect for people are core to kanban. Kanban helps you discover improvement opportunities. We then turned our attention to a couple of common practices for improvements: A retrospective is a way for a

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Kata— Including improvement work in your daily work Improvement Kata— A formalized way to improve your process Coaching Kata— Improving the learners The “kata” in Kanban Kata indicates that you follow a set way of working toward a goal, until the routine becomes second nature and making improvements becomes the way

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Chapter 11. Using metrics to guide improvements This chapter covers Metrics and how they can help you improve Some common metrics and visualizations used by kanban teams How to find good metrics for your team Chapter 10 talked a lot about improvements and starting to make changes to your process in

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you measure your process behavior and analyze these metrics. Metrics are like a visualization of your process’s health. The following are common metrics that kanban teams use: Cycle time— Time taken to complete part of the process Lead time— Time taken to complete the whole process Throughput— How many items

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versus failure demand— Demand on a system caused by failure to do something or do something right for the customer These are common diagrams that kanban teams use: Statistical process control (SPC) chart—A visualization of lead and cycle times Cumulative flow diagram (CFD)— Shows a lot of information about

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,” http://mng.bz/OrXd. Ken Schwaber is, together with Jeff Sutherland, the father of Scrum. He was commenting on the lack of iterations in kanban. To him, kanban was just a long list of work lined up, with no end in sight: just work, work, work. That doesn’t sound too nice

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constrained by it. Take the opportunity to defer decisions until the “last responsible moment,”[4] when you have the most information in your hands. Using kanban, you can also greatly benefit from showing your stakeholders what you’ve done and how you’re progressing, with demonstrations and reviews. 4 Mary and

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organization, the risk of changing is greater. The great news here is that you’re in control of the tempo at which you improve with kanban. With more aggressive, lower WIP limits, for example, more improvement opportunities will present themselves. Putting stuff out in production earlier and more often will

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hinder your flow, then you can start questioning how or whether you should do planning, estimating, iterations, and so on. Some teams that start “doing” kanban stop doing the good practices that some other method has given them, such as standups, retrospectives, and reviews. We often hear stuff like “We used

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a little about each item, why we chose it, and what we find about it that’s particularly good. A.1. Books on Lean and kanban Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business (David J. Anderson, Blue Hole Press, 2010, http://amzn.com/0984521402)—This is the book in which David

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is an introduction to extreme programming (XP), one of the first agile methods. It describes several of the most important agile practices used by many kanban teams. The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software (Jonathan Rasmusson, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2010, http://amzn.com/1934356581)—This book is short, pragmatic,

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writing code, we have found the following books interesting and have learned a lot from them that we can use in practice to assist our kanban teams: Specification by Example: How Successful Teams Deliver the Right Software (Gojko Adzic, Manning, 2011, www.manning.com/adzic/)—Specification by example is a

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/author/mattiasskarin (Mattias Skarin) http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com (David Joyce) http://blog.jabebloom.com (Jabe Bloom) http://www.klausleopold.com (Klaus Leopold) http://www.software-kanban.de (Arne Roock) http://lizkeogh.com (Liz Keogh) http://zuill.us/WoodyZuill (Woody Zuill) A.5.2. Noteworthy Twitter accounts Here are some of the

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Twitter accounts that we follow on Lean, kanban, and agile, in alphabetical order: Chris Achouiantz @ChrisAch Gojko Adzic @gojkoadzic Agile Borat @AgileBorat David J. Anderson @djaa_dja Jurgen Appelo @jurgenappelo Kent Beck @

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as JIRA, Team Foundation Server, and so on, but in most cases these tools are separate systems. B.1.1. LeanKit Kanban LeanKit Kanban (http://leankit.com) is a lightweight kanban tool that supports many of the advanced practices discussed in this book. In fact, we’ve used it during the planning and

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the paid version. 2 The Pomodoro technique is a personal time-management technique that helps you focus your work into short timeboxes. B.1.5. Kanbanize Kanbanize (http://kanbanize.com) looks promising, although we haven’t used it. The feature list is extensive, and it offers a live demo of the tool. There

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refrigerators Intangible class iron triangle issues. See blocked work items. iterations J JIRA JIRA Agile just-in-time concept, 2nd K kaizen Kanbanery KanbanFlow Kanbanize kata. See also Kanban Kata. KPIs (key performance indicators) L Law of Average Averages law of diminishing returns laziness Lean, 2nd Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

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flow and implementation process lower better than higher people idle vs. work idle people-based limits picking a column pitfall of not using principle of kanban priority filters queues and setting limits one is not answer stop starting, start finishing starting from bottleneck by story points swarming technique using avatars work

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WIP limits, not using Plan-Do-Check-Act. See PDCA. Planning Poker technique policies, making explicit Pomodoro positive peer pressure predicting wait times principles of kanban priority filters proactive work process policies process smells procrastination of intangible items prominently displaying information pull principle pulling work Q R Rational Unified Process. See

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daily standup Reinertsen, Don relative estimates relearning reporting progress resource utilization, 2nd Retrospective Handbook, The return of time invested. See ROTI. revolution needed to introduce kanban rework, avoiding risk-management information roles ROTI (return of time invested) RUP (Rational Unified Process), 2nd S scheduling. See also planning. Schwaber, Ken scientific method

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better than higher no limit is not answer people idle vs. work idle people-based limits picking a column pitfall of not using principle of kanban priority filters queues and setting limits starting from bottleneck by story points swarming technique using avatars work items vs. tasks Little’s law software development

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

by David J. Anderson  · 6 Apr 2010  · 318pp  · 78,451 words

Build Trust Tacit Knowledge Balance Demand against Throughput Create Slack Prioritize Influence Building Maturity Attack Sources of Variability to Improve Predictability Recipe for Success and Kanban Takeaways Chapter 4: From Worst to Best in Five Quarters The Problem Visualize the Workflow Factors Affecting Performance Make Process Policies Explicit Estimation Was a

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Anatomy of a Work Item Card Electronic Tracking Setting Input and Output Boundaries Coping with Concurrency Coping with Unordered Activities Takeaways Chapter 7: Coordination with Kanban Systems Visual Control and Pull Electronic Tracking Daily Standup Meetings Release Planning Meetings Triage Issue Log Review and Escalation Sticky Buddies Synchronizing across Geographic Locations

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Service Takeaways Chapter 12: Metrics and Management Reporting Tracking WIP Due Date Performance Throughput Issues and Blocked Work Items Flow Efficiency Takeaways Chapter 13: Scaling Kanban Hierarchical Requirements Decouple Value Delivery from Work Item Variability Introducing Swim Lanes Alternative Approach to Size Variability Incorporating Classes of Service Systems Integration Managing Shared

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Improvement Opportunity Bottlenecks, Waste Elimination, and Reduction of Variability Theory of Constraints Five Focusing Steps Lean, TPS, and Waste Reduction Deming and Six Sigma Fitting Kanban to Your Company Culture Takeaways Chapter 17: Bottlenecks and Non-Instant Availability Capacity-Constrained Resources Elevation Actions Exploitation/Protection Actions Subordination Actions Non-Instant Availability

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Takeaways Chapter 20: Issue Management and Escalation Policies Managing Issues Escalating Issues Tracking and Reporting Issues Takeaways Acknowledgments About the Author Praise for Kanban David’s work with Kanban Systems has been a significant influence on how I approach software development and has changed the way I think about processes. Rather than

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, and is a must-read for anyone looking for ways of creating successful and sustainable development organizations. —Karl Scotland Senior Practice Consultant, EMC Consulting Kanban is a tricky subject to write on, since everyone’s implementation will be tailored to their specific workflow and bottlenecks, but David manages to provide

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—Christina Skaskiw Agile coach Best new change methodology I have seen for software in the last ten years. —David A. Bulkin Vice President, Lithespeed, LLC Kanban Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business David J. Anderson Sequim, Washington Blue Hole Press 72 Buckhorn Road Sequim, WA 98382 www.blueholepress.com Copyright

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better quality helps to shorten lead times and improve predictability and due-date performance. By establishing a regular release cadence and delivering against it consistently, Kanban helps to build trust with customers and trust along the value stream with other departments, suppliers, and dependent downstream partners. By doing all of

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the recent implementations; all of them emerged at Corbis during 2007. We expect this list to grow as we learn more about the effects of Kanban on organizations. Process uniquely tailored to each project/value stream Decoupled Cadences (or “Iterationless” Development) Work Scheduled by (opportunity) Cost of Delay Value Optimized

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understanding of variability through the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, and the concept of muda (waste) from the Toyota Production System. The models used with Kanban are continually evolving, and ideas from other fields, such as sociology, psychology, and risk management are appearing in some implementations. [2]. Highsmith, Jim. Agile

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profession, encouraging teams to devise context-specific process solutions rather than dogmatically following a software development lifecycle process definition or template. Part Two: Benefits of Kanban Chapter 3: A Recipe for Success Over the past decade, I’ve been challenged to answer the following question: As a manager, what actions should

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the need for slack. Reducing variability enables a resource balancing (and, potentially, a reduction in headcount). Reducing variability reduces resource requirements. Reducing variability allows reduced kanban tokens, less WIP, and results in reduced average lead time. Slack enables improvement opportunities. Process improvement leads to greater productivity and greater predictability. Chapter 4

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and the queue was replenished each week. Trust began to build with the product managers. Adjusting Policies Note: This is a common theme in the Kanban Method. The combination of explicit policies, transparency, and visualization empowers individual team members to make their own decisions and to manage risks themselves. Management comes

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of capability in change management can adopt Agile development methods, such as Scrum, faster and better than less mature organizations. When you first implement Kanban you are seeking to optimize existing processes and change the organizational culture rather than switch out existing processes for others that may provide dramatic economic

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named-change initiative. Introducing a radical change is harder than incrementally improving an existing one. You should also understand that the collaborative-game aspects of Kanban will contribute to a significant shift in your corporate culture and its maturity. This shift will later enable much more significant changes, again with lower

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were not considered capacity constrained and were, to some extent, outside our immediate political control. Primary Effects of the Changes The effects of introducing a kanban system were, at one level, unsurprising, yet at another, they were quite remarkable. We started to make releases every two weeks. After about three

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for scheduling and planning releases had dropped dramatically, and the bickering between the development teams and the program management office had almost completely disappeared. So kanban had delivered on its basic promise. We were putting out high-quality releases very regularly, with a minimum of management overhead. Transaction and coordination costs

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individual contributors and can focus their mental energy on other things, such as process performance, risk management, staff development, and improved customer and employee satisfaction. Kanban greatly enhances the level of social capital within the team. The improved levels of trust and the elimination of fear encourage collaborative innovation and problem

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that cultural change was so desirable that the cost of changing the many mechanics of prioritization, scheduling, reporting, and delivery that would result from implementing Kanban was considered a price worth paying. [1]. Chrissis, Mary Beth, Mike Konrad, and Sandy Shrum. CMMI: Guildelines for Process Integration and Product Improvement, 2d

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Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum. Boston: Addison Wesley, 2008. [4]. Willeke, Eric, with David J. Anderson and Eric Landes (editors) Proceedings of the Lean & Kanban 2009 Conference. Bloomington, IN: Wordclay, 2009. Takeaways Kaizen means “continuous improvement.” A kaizen culture is one in which individuals feel empowered, act without fear, affiliate

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collaboration from swarming on problems and interaction with external stakeholders raises the level of social capital within the team and the trust among team members. Kanban WIP limits and classes of service empower individuals to pull work and make prioritization and scheduling decisions without supervision or direction from a superior. Increased

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In some cases, the incoming types might be hierarchical, such as Epic, a collection of user stories. Typical work item types seen on teams adopting Kanban have included, but are not limited to, the following. Requirement Feature User Story Use Case Change Request Production Defect Maintenance Refactoring Bug Improvement Suggestion Blocking

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for teams that aspire to higher levels of organizational maturity. If you anticipate the need for quantitative management, organizational process performance (comparing the performance across kanban systems, teams or projects), and/or causal analysis and resolution (root-cause analysis based on statistically sound data), you will want to use an electronic

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the physical board is synchronized with the electronic system. Takeaways Best practice is to use both a physical card wall and an electronic tracking system. Kanban is possible across multiple geographic locations, provided that an electronic tracking system is used. Electronic systems that simulate the functionality of a physical card wall

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Behind the Agile Manifesto, 2001, http://www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html Takeaways “Delivery cadence” means an agreed-upon, regular interval between deliveries of working software. Kanban decouples delivery cadence from both development lead time and prioritization cadence. Short, time-boxed iterations have led to dysfunction with some teams attempting to adopt

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make sense to have on-demand or ad hoc prioritization rather than a regularly scheduled prioritization meeting. Coordination Costs of Prioritization When we were introducing Kanban at Corbis, in 2006, we chose to start with the sustaining engineering effort that handled minor upgrade requests and production bug fixes for the

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and fulfillment—essentially the business’s supply chain. Six departments competed for the shared resources available to make these small changes and upgrades. When the kanban system was first introduced, a business case had been made for a sustaining engineering function that could provide frequent, tactical releases. This sustainment function would

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costs and the coordination costs of prioritization are reduced. This reduction facilitates much more frequent prioritization meetings because the meetings remain efficient. This has enabled kanban teams to make ad hoc or on-demand prioritization. Making On-Demand or Ad Hoc Prioritization As described in chapter 4, in 2004, Dragos Dumitriu

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introduced a kanban system with his XIT Sustaining Engineering team at Microsoft. The upstream business partners were four product managers who represented several business units. They focused and

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with a regular cadence. Takeaways “Prioritization cadence” means an agreed-upon regular interval between meetings to prioritize new work into the input queue for development. Kanban removes potential dysfunction around the coordination of iteration planning in Agile methods by decoupling the prioritization cadence from the development lead time and delivery. Prioritization

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and tracked. Policies concerning the method of prioritization and the inputs for decision making represent the rules of the collaborative cooperative game of prioritizing in Kanban applied to software development. Planning games used in Agile methods do not scale easily and can represent a significant coordination cost for larger teams

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potential advantage because impediments caused by unexpected, unanticipated variability may cause an upstream step to become a temporary bottleneck. The local WIP limit with the kanban system will stop the line quickly, keeping the system from clogging and becoming overloaded. When the impediment is removed, the system will then restart

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improvement, while others were disbanded in corporate reorganizations or project cancellations, denying us further data points. At Corbis, several teams on major projects pursued Kanban with only very loose WIP limits on course-grained, high-level functionality. The results were somewhat mixed. I’ve become convinced that the tension created

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of service need to change. It may even provide sufficient evidence for realigning or augmenting staffing. Takeaways Major projects should follow the core principles of Kanban. WIP limits, prioritization cadence, delivery cadence, and classes of service are valid techniques for major projects. Major projects tend to have hierarchical requirements; these

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highlighted with blocking- issue tickets (pink, in our example) attached to the original work item ticket. Shared resources should develop their own kanban systems. A network of kanban systems for shared resources across a portfolio of projects can be thought of as a service-oriented architecture for software development. Chapter 14

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and the new process is in place, another assessment is conducted to demonstrate the adoption of the new methods. This is not the approach with Kanban. With Kanban, there is no planned initiative, no assessments, and no declaration at the end that, “Now we are Agile!” Ideally, there is no end.

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will validate my belief that lead time affects defect rates in a non-linear fashion. Takeaways There are at least eight possible goals for introducing Kanban to your organization. Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the

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stress. Part Four: Making Improvements Chapter 16: Three Types of Improvement Opportunity Chapters 6 through 15 describe how to build and operate a kanban system and adopt the Kanban approach to change management and improvement. The remainder of the book describes how to recognize opportunities for improvement, what to do about them

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enable an entire Lean initiative in your software, systems, product development, or IT organization. If you company subscribes to and uses the Theory of Constraints, Kanban can enable an entire constraints-management (bottleneck-removal) program in your software, systems, product development, or IT organization. However, you might need to recast

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the pull system implementation as a Drum-Buffer-Rope implementation rather than refer to is as kanban system. Because Kanban developed from an earlier Drum-Buffer-Rope implementation, I know this will work. However, discussion of the specifics of how to model the value

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and the impact that swift resolution of an issue will provide. Hence, developing an organizational capability of transparently tracking and reporting on projects using a kanban system is critical to improving performance. Transparency leads to visibility of both bottlenecks and impediments and, consequently, to improved exploitation of available capacity to do

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issues. This will enable objective decisions about improvement opportunities and the likely benefits of investment in root-cause fixes to prevent special-cause variations. Takeaways Kanban systems should have a first-class work item type, Issue, used to track problems causing other customer-valued work to block. It has become

Agile Project Management With Kanban

by Eric Brechner  · 25 Feb 2015

technical debt Estimate features and tasks Track expected completion date Right-size your team Basic approach Advanced approach Checklist Chapter 4 Adapting from Waterfall Introducing Kanban to a Waterfall team Working in feature teams Completing features before starting new ones Dealing with specs and bugs Specs Bugs Engaging with customers Celebrating

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performance improvements Rude Q & A Checklist Chapter 5 Evolving from Scrum Introducing Kanban to a Scrum Team Mapping the roles and terms Evolving the events Celebrating performance improvements Rude Q & A Checklist Chapter 6 Deploying components, apps,

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and services Continuous integration Continuous push Continuous publishing Continuous deployment Checklist Chapter 7 Using Kanban within large organizations Deriving a backlog from big upfront planning Ordering work based on dependencies Fitting into milestones Communicating status up and out Dealing with

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http://twitter.com/MicrosoftPress Chapter 1. Getting management consent This book describes how you can manage software projects with great efficiency, predictability, and simplicity using Kanban. Kanban helps you deliver value to your customers faster than Waterfall, Scrum, or just about any other project-management method. It helps you deliver that value

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to remove the mystery, understand the source of productivity and quality gains, and gain confidence in the approach that only personal experience provides. Fortunately, Kanban simulations are available that deliver hands-on practice with the approach and demonstrate how and why it works. It’s worth bringing in an experienced

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good. You shouldn’t overload implementation, and you should probably be helping to unblock implementation. More about that in this chapter’s “Troubleshooting” section. Kanban distinguishes between finishing one step and starting the next. Of course, those are always two different things. However, signboards used for Scrum or other daily

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ideas from the team. Not as much coordination with other teams was required. I provide more detail about experiences like these in Chapter 7, “Using Kanban within large organizations.” * * * Establish your minimum viable product (MVP) You can skip this section if you run a continuously deployed service or an operational

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in feature teams Completing features before starting new ones Dealing with specs and bugs Engaging with customers Celebrating performance improvements Rude Q & A Checklist Introducing Kanban to a Waterfall team A traditional Waterfall team is one that likely has members who’ve been doing product development for decades. Their habits were

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necessary, utilize people’s valuable Waterfall experience, and lightly adjust their familiar methods to facilitate a smooth workflow and quick cadence. Once the team masters Kanban, it can choose to improve further by making more significant adjustments to its approach. However, the starting point can feel familiar and straightforward. To

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the same manager or as a virtual team. However, some groups completely separate different disciplines, using formal handoff procedures between disciplines, including associated documentation. With Kanban, you can maintain separate disciplines and formal handoff procedures if you prefer. The handoff procedures map directly to the done rules for each step. However

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and implementing them and between creating bugs and fixing them. In practice, that reduced time leads to the simplified handling of specs and bugs in Kanban. Specs Many traditional Waterfall teams write detailed design specification documents (“specs”) for every feature, all of which are reviewed and approved before implementation starts.

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practices unnecessary. In a large organization, a cross-team, product-wide triage stabilization period might still be needed (see Chapter 7), but individual teams using Kanban won’t have enough bugs to make team triage, bug jail, or workaholic Wednesdays useful. Engaging with customers Traditional Waterfall teams typically engage with customers

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One product team uses a variety of methodologies: Scrum, Scrummerfall (traditional Waterfall with short, fixed-length milestones called “sprints”), variants of Extreme Programming (XP), and Kanban. All of these techniques enable frequent customer feedback. The move to monthly releases had its challenges, but was surprisingly smooth and natural. In hindsight, I

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capture agility, productivity, and quality. I selected these particular measures—completed tasks and unresolved bugs—because they are easy to calculate for both Waterfall and Kanban, they have clear definitions, and they relate directly to agility, productivity, and quality. Here’s a breakdown of each measure: Notes on these measures:

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periods. Arrange opportunities for frequent customer feedback on the continuous value added to your products. Perform the actions listed in the checklist in Chapter 2, “Kanban quick-start guide.” Measure completed tasks and unresolved bugs, or whatever productivity and quality metrics you choose, on a regular basis. Celebrate productivity and quality

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avoids the interruption of work during a sprint, but it leads to delays in plan adjustments, feedback, releases, and improvements and adds extra events. Kanban removes the artificial sprint boundaries and the additional events while keeping the workflow smooth and uninterrupted. In addition, Scrum introduces a number of special terms

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everything possible to incrementally deliver a high-quality, usable product to customers while keeping progress up to date and visible to everyone directly involved. In Kanban, the team’s project manager is responsible for sharing that progress with those indirectly involved, such as leadership and the larger organization. Every team

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improvements quickly and provide their feedback (either directly or through usage patterns). There’s no requirement for a regular Sprint Review event. However, a Kanban team might still choose to hold regular or special presentations to highlight compelling features or to get feedback on design decisions. No regular Sprint Retrospective

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tasks immediately if breakdowns in workflow or quality occur. However, other subtle or surprising issues may arise that disrupt quality or workflow. When that happens, Kanban teams should discuss the issues in depth and drive improvements to their product, tools, and approach, just as they did as Scrum Teams. Celebrating

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us to do that anytime and all the time. Q But our Sprint Retrospectives encouraged us to improve. Won’t we lose that with Kanban? A The Kanban board, work-in-progress (WIP) limits, and done rules make issues immediately apparent. There’s no need to wait for the end of

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For each of these models, I cover how to assign completed items to deployments, how to track when those items are deployed, and how the Kanban approach affects your deployment cadence and customer feedback mechanisms. The topics covered are: Continuous integration Continuous push Continuous publishing Continuous deployment Checklist Continuous integration Continuous

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(“continuous delivery”) and automatically deploying every build to production (“continuous deployment”). It is important to be clear about which approach your team decides to take. * * * Kanban is a natural fit for continuous deployment because the tasks you complete daily are production-quality, and thus ready for deployment. If you are deploying

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and apps and our continuous integration of value for customers. Checklist Here’s a checklist of actions for deploying components, apps, and services by using Kanban: For continuous integration of changes: • Follow an integration strategy for your team branch that avoids merge and interface conflicts. • Divide the rightmost Done column

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about high-level strategic planning, crowdsourcing, or classic project management—there are good books and materials available on those subjects. This book is about using Kanban effectively in a variety of situations, including within large organizations. In a large organization, different teams often use different project-management methods. Your feature team

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(3–10 people) might use Kanban, carry little technical debt (bugs, shortcuts, and regrettable decisions), and always have production-ready code. Other feature teams might use traditional Waterfall, Scrummerfall (traditional

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is doing in dealing with escalations. These metrics are visible to all stakeholders. Improve collaboration with customer support Through a process that sits alongside the Kanban workflow, the core engineering team works more directly with support, accounting for user issues and collaboratively prioritizing work. Improve team motivation Because the overall process

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of the core engineering team. Removes any duplicate escalations. Validates that enough data is supplied with the escalation. Stack-ranks any incoming escalations on the Kanban board. Recommends the release vehicle for any escalations that are immediately deemed bugs, such as a customer hotfix or general service pack. Ensures cross-

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in the “Troubleshooting” section in Chapter 2.) Problem: The Waiting section on the signboard has a large number of items Fortunately, you are using Kanban, so unreleased fixes become visible quickly. Perhaps the team needs to consider more frequent releases in the form of higher cadence deployments or additional downloadable

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team, collaboration between support and development is frequent and more effective, giving support input into the stack ranking. Knowing that the SE team is using Kanban, the support team is confident that issues will be addressed as quickly as possible. To further improve the predictability of escalation completion dates, simply

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new ideas. Scenario-Focused Engineering relies heavily on iteration and customer feedback to adjust designs, prototype new ideas, and hone in on the optimal design. Kanban’s continuous delivery and continuous customer feedback is ideally suited for SFE. * * * See also De Bonte, Austina, and Drew Fletcher. Scenario-Focused Engineering: A

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Toolbox for Innovation and Customer-Centricity. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 2014. * * * Personal Kanban Many personal projects have a start and an end, including home maintenance, school assignments, and blog entries. If you find yourself needing a little more

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, and feature specifications. After all, it’s hard to write acceptance tests without clear acceptance criteria. ATDD fits well as an additional step on your Kanban board. You might name the steps after Backlog as “Write Acceptance Test,” “Breakdown,” “Implement,” and “Validate.” The “Write Acceptance Test” done rule might be,

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TDD and refactoring, and some have used pair programming. All of the methods listed here are valuable and can fit well on your Kanban board. Why Kanban works Why does Kanban work so well? It’s a combination of visualization, minimalism, Little’s Law, single-piece flow, the theory of constraints, and

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Little’s Law says response time equals WIP divided by throughput. Therefore, to minimize response time, you’ve got to reduce WIP and increase throughput. Kanban reduces WIP with its WIP limits and increases throughput by visualizing work (exposing workflow issues), enforcing done rules (which increases quality and reduces rework), and

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Enhance your agility with test-driven development (TDD), refactoring, acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), pair programming, or DevOps. Learn about how Kanban works by studying Little’s Law, single-piece flow, the theory of constraints (TOC), and drum-buffer-rope. Apply a critical chain to break down

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45–46, 48–51 defined, 102 evolving from Scrum, 62–65 ordering work, 28–29 sustained engineering, 109–111 troubleshooting problems, 20 business applications, scaling Kanban, 118–119 C chaos, setting limits on, 10–12 checklist of actions to take adapting from Waterfall, 56 deadline management, 37 deploying finished work, 83

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–84 evolving from Scrum, 70 Kanban, 24, 136 large organizations, 100 for management consent, 5 sustained engineering, 115–116 Chelimsky, David, 122 completed tasks measurement adapting from Waterfall, 48–51

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sustained engineering, 105–106, 111, 113 D daily standup meetings about, 14–17 adapting from Waterfall, 42–43, 52 evolving from Scrum, 61, 68 Personal Kanban and, 120 sustained engineering, 115 troubleshooting problems, 23, 115 De Bonte, Austina, 119 deadline management about, 25 checklist of actions to take, 37 establishing

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P pair programming, 122 Pair Programming Illuminated (Williams and Kessler), 122 performance improvements adapting from Waterfall, 48–51 evolving from Scrum, 62–65 Personal Kanban, 120 Personal Kanban (Benson and Barry), 120 plan outline in proposal letter, 3 planning, deriving backlog from, 86–88 planning poker method, 30 PMs (program managers),

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Scrum, 65–69 S Scenario-Focused Engineering (De Bonte and Fletcher), 119 Scenario-Focused Engineering (SFE) design work and, 21 global optimization and, 132 scaling Kanban and, 118–119 Schwaber, Ken, 57 Scrum Master, 60, 67 Scrum method, evolving from celebrating performance improvements, 62–65 checklist of actions to take,

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SE (sustained engineering). See sustained engineering Sedden, John, 135 service packs, 102 SFE (Scenario-Focused Engineering) design work and, 21 global optimization and, 132 scaling Kanban and, 118–119 signboards about, 8–9 adapting from Waterfall, 42, 53–55 communicating status up and out, 92–93 continuous deployment, 81 continuous integration

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and goals, 102–103 checklist of actions to take, 115–116 collaborating for efficiency, 106–108 consistent vocabulary, 102 determining ownership, 104–105 implementing Kanban workflow, 108–111 Kanban tools, 111–112 key stakeholders, 103–104 laying out support tiers, 105–106 roles and responsibilities, 103–104 troubleshooting problems, 112–115 T

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82 continuous publishing and, 79 continuous push and, 77 ordering work based on dependences, 88 sustained engineering and, 111 tracking project status, 91, 93 visualization Kanban and, 123–124 large organizations, 86–88 W waiting (Lean waste category), 131 Waletzy, James, 101–116 Waterfall, adapting from celebrating performance improvements, 48–51

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life

by Jim Benson and Tonianne Demaria Barry  · 2 Feb 2011  · 147pp  · 37,622 words

Author of Simplifying Innovation Personal productivity systems usually fail in practice because of complexity—they don’t reflect the collaborative nature of real work. Personal Kanban provides the simplest structure that could possibly work and lets you achieve a state of flow. ~ Ross Mayfield CEO of SocialText As an executive tasked

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addition to the transliteracy toolbox. And I’m enjoying the iPhone app! ~ Sue Thomas Director of the Institute for Creative Technology De Montfort University PERSONAL KANBAN Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry FIRST MODUS COOPERANDI PRESS EDITION, JANUARY 2011 © 2011 Modus Cooperandi Press Cover Photo: © 2009

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Prioritize Smaller, Faster, Better: Controlling Task Size and Limiting WIP Prioritization in Theory and Practice Urgency & Importance Live Your Own Life Expert: Metrics in Personal Kanban PKFlow Tips CHAPTER 7 Strive for Improvement Clarity Conquers All Course Corrections: The Reality of Reprioritization The Bedrock of Introspection Retrospectives Solving Problems at Their

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Source PKFlow Tips ENDGAME Endgame APPENDIX A Personal Kanban Design Patterns Jessica’s Story: Future in Progress and Multiple Value Streams Sequestering Approach: Dealing with Repetitive Tasks Emergency Response Approach: Taming Unexpected Workloads Time

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Capsule Approach Balanced Throughput Approach APPENDIX B Personal Kanban and Social Media Facebook Twitter Blogging FOREWORD THE AGONY OF CRISIS MANAGEMENT As an avid reader of business literature and a recovering human capital practitioner

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, most recently as Deputy, Human Resources at the Central Intelligence Agency, (retired), I’ve found Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life both insightful and timely. As we all cope in our own way with managing our work schedules and balancing our personal

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agony of crisis management and balancing your own crap to fun ratios. Tom McCluskey Deputy, Human Resources (Retired) Central Intelligence Agency November 2010 INTRODUCTION PERSONAL KANBAN: 100% NEW AGE FREE I hesitated writing anything in this book that would smack of dimestore self-improvement or seem unnecessarily huggy and harmonically convergent

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the office, but everything that mattered to me. Rather than being pushed by life, I wanted to pull life along with me. I wanted Personal Kanban. Personal Kanban is a simple, elegant mechanism that produces dramatic results. It helps us manage ourselves, but also lets us share our work, our goals, and

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as they traveled through a value stream—a graphic depiction of the steps in the software development process. The system was both simple and effective. Kanban for software development worked great for managing software creation, better than anything we’d used before. Its focus on team work increased productivity and effectiveness

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last responsible moment, and continuously striving to improve. We learned that understanding our work is the key to controlling it. In a manufacturing setting, organizational kanban visualizes how value is created, usually in the service of reducing waste and creating standard work. Adhering to this rule proved difficult in an office

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, the underlying principles of visualizing your work and limiting your WIP remain constant, giving you the minimum structure to remain in control. Think of Personal Kanban as a dynamic, interactive map that surveys your personal landscape for what excites, worries, or amuses you. It reveals what lies ahead (your goals,

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goal is to understand the predictable and repeatable process of creating something, whether it’s a nuclear submarine or a pastrami on rye. So organizational kanban focuses on standard work products, organizational efficiencies, and waste reduction. It takes a given repeatable process and replicates it, each time doing it faster, cheaper

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our work, but not force it into some rigid process. Innovation relies on inspiration through exploration and experimentation. Innovation requires improvement. As mentioned earlier, Personal Kanban (and by extension this book) is based on the principles and techniques of a management concept known as “Lean.” Lean is both a philosophy and

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s goal of a “kaizen” culture. Kaizen is a state of continuous improvement where people naturally look for ways to improve poorly performing practices. Personal Kanban facilitates kaizen. When we visualize our work, we adopt a kaizen mindset; we are weened from the comfort of complacency and actively seek out opportunities

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ineffectiveness. As we track patterns in our work, problems are made apparent and solutions become easier to find. WHY THIS WORKS On the surface, Personal Kanban is deceptively simple: visualize your work, limit your WIP, and pay attention to what’s happening in your life. The psychology, neuropsychology, sociology, educational theory

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, and politics of Personal Kanban could certainly generate enough discussion for a series of books. This book is simply an introduction and more than enough information to get you started

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overhead by transforming fuzzy concepts into tangible objects that your brain can easily grasp and prioritize. Narratives and Maps Sticky notes flow through our Personal Kanban, converting work from static data into an instructional narrative. “The story” of our work is a familiar one, following the arc of stories from

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through to its completion. The most simple value stream is READY (work waiting to be processed), DOING (work-in-progress), and DONE (completed work). Personal Kanban accommodates life’s variation. Tasks change constantly, varying in size, urgency, ramifications, and “customer” (who you are doing the work for, which may include your

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be less effective. Visualizing work and limiting WIP neutralizes the cognitive overload brought on by the Zeigarnik Effect, dispelling uncertainty and promoting follow-through. Personal Kanban provides kinesthetic, visual, and narrative feedback. When you pull that sticky note into DONE, it’s brain candy. You’re satisfying your brain’s need

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BACKLOG WRITING IN REVIEW REVISION FINAL REVIEW FINAL DRAFT COMPLETE Even with small projects, watch for predictable stages in work and make sure your Personal Kanban takes them into account. Every time your work involves another person or something happens outside your immediate control, make sure it is reflected on your

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we can see our context and understand our options that we can effectively prioritize, work with our passions, and find purpose. Learning vs. Reacting Personal Kanban To-do Lists Liberating Anxiety Inducing Proactive Reactive Enduring Ephemeral Kinesthetic Didactic Flow Focused Task Focused Contextual Detached Optimized for Clarity Optimized for Cataloging Narrative

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these types of observations we can proactively make decisions that increase the value of the options we exercise in the future. Creating vs. Producing Personal Kanban To-do Lists Actionable Overwhelming Collaborative Autonomous Options-based Single Points of Failure Flexible Prescriptive Effectiveness Productivity Pull Push To-do lists thrive in productivity

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each other’s time and talents, teams are able to expand individual and collective knowledge, ultimately expanding individual and collective options. Evolution vs. Stagnation Personal Kanban To-do Lists Adaptable Static Experiential Authoritarian Continuous Improvement Continuous Work Pull Push In order to apply what we learn, our practices need to keep

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in place to stabilize a company (get control of backlog, balance the books) and promote sustainability (keep the company competitive, innovative, and profitable). Similarly, Personal Kanban helps you gain control of your backlog, understand your commitments, and pull work more effectively so that you too can achieve stability and sustainability while

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done well historically, and what makes us happy. Equipped with this knowledge, we can interpret our options, weigh our commitments, and prioritize our tasks. Personal Kanban balances our productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, making them three parts of the same kaizen machine. When we are truly productive, efficient, and effective we are

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work contexts, we find that such rigid definitions deter us from engaging in activities with unknown or highly variable value. When combined with your Personal Kanban, the Time Management Matrix adds another dimension of context to your backlog, creating an options valuation and kaizen matrix that is positive and proactive. To

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describe this new twist, let’s explore how Personal Kanban extends Covey’s interpretation. URGENT AND IMPORTANT Classic Covey - The Quadrant of Necessity: This quadrant reflects tasks that are both urgent and important, responding to

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-related activities such as enhancing skills, removing bottlenecks, and ensuring effectiveness. This is the quadrant where potential improvements or kaizen events are realized. The Personal Kanban Difference - The Quadrant of Kaizen: This quadrant contains quality-related tasks—the time and effort you spend here is an investment in future quality. Elevating

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activities” that provide no apparent value and distract us from being productive.4 Covey strongly recommends avoiding actions that fit into this quadrant. The Personal Kanban Difference - The Organic Quadrant: It’s your life. You define your pastimes, you define your waste, you define your value. Some people consider playing online

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Prioritization Created by David Allen, “Getting Things Done” (GTD) is an organizational method to control backlogs and capture ideas for future work.6 Like Personal Kanban, GTD improves your understanding of how and why work is conducted. GTD relies on lists and folders with review disciplines to record and manage massive

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certain kinds of tasks that may require special attention. Sometimes a little visual reinforcement is the push to action we need. EXPERT: METRICS IN PERSONAL KANBAN You can observe a lot by just watching. ~ Yogi Berra Metrics help us gauge our progress, validate our performance, measure proximity to our goals,

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that measurement is relevant. Note: Don’t fall prey to “metric-blindness,” where you rely too heavily on metrics without having good situational knowledge. Personal Kanban not only tracks workflow, it generates a wealth of actionable data: it offers insight into the root causes of performance shortfalls and successes, creating an

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. Blindly followed plans are no substitute for being attentive, and adjusting our actions to best serve our goals. Predicated on observation, experimentation, and adjustment, Personal Kanban is much more reliable and scientific than mere guesswork. Now that we’ve allowed ourselves the freedom to adapt to our surroundings, it’s time

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or to failure—not necessarily the success or failure itself. Looking back on the context of our work through retrospectives adds another dimension to Personal Kanban.5 Retrospectives are regular and ritualized moments of collective reflection. A practice common to the Agile and Lean communities, retrospectives allow a team to pause

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make inferences from more complex patterns, like guessing our supervisor’s reaction after we’ve submitted our expense report late for three consecutive months. Personal Kanban takes advantage of this most basic trait. Visualizing tasks and engaging with them physically and cognitively allows us to comprehend patterns in our work. We

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’ve learned that life is complex and cannot be taken for granted. We need to respect natural variation and we need to respect ourselves. Personal Kanban can help us see life’s complexities and make better decisions. With introspection, kaizen, and retrospectives we are better informed, more attentive, and relaxed.

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want to track progress made on each chapter through the pre-writing, writing, editing, and finalization stages. Adding separate, dedicated swim lanes to your Personal Kanban helps you visualize related tasks. This approach continues to let you manage your overall WIP while giving you control over and insight into the flow

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. Note: Don’t attempt to timebox all of your tasks in 25 minute intervals. To avoid burn out, use the Pomodoro Technique sparingly. PORTABLE PERSONAL KANBAN Students, consultants, real estate brokers, fitness coaches, facilitators, teachers, district managers, parents. For those of us who don’t spend the majority of our day

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their time, input, and graciousness. This book would never have taken shape without the invaluable feedback we received from the initial, vocal adopters of Personal Kanban. When we floated those first blog posts, the following individuals embraced the idea and were quick to provide a sounding board, rapidly selforganizing into a

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global Personal Kanban community of practice. They include Paul Eastabrook, Christopher Beer, Patty Beidleman, Joakim Sunden, Peter Hultgren, Maritza van den Heuvel, Joe Dager, Melanie Haven Gilbert, Janice

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within an organization’s culture, she helps individuals use their history to establish priorities, achieve goals, and make informed and innovative decisions. Much like Personal Kanban itself, she wants her clients to acknowledge their past and present context, appreciate the interconnectedness and flow of events, and extract lessons from the patterns

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and practices that create collaborative systems, make constraints explicit, reward innovation, and provide meaningful performance metrics. MORE FROM MODUS COOPERANDI PRESS Books: Scrumban: Esssays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development by Corey Ladas Available on Amazon, iBooks, and at personalkanban.com Coming Soon: Scrumban II: Stories of Continuous Improvement Kidzban

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: Personal Kanban for Kids The latest publications and videos from Modus Cooperandi Press are available at: http://moduscooperandi.com/ Table of Contents TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE FOREWORD

Real-World Kanban

by Mattias Skarin  · 23 Jun 2015

just leaving it out, but then people wrote us to ask about the missing pages. Anyway, Eddy the Gerbil wanted to say “hello.” Real-World Kanban Do Less, Accomplish More with Lean Thinking Mattias Skarin The Pragmatic Bookshelf Dallas, Texas • Raleigh, North Carolina Many of the designations used by manufacturers and

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at a Traditional Company How We Got Started How the Process Worked What Lessons We Learned Comparing Now and Before Make Your Own Improvements 3. . . Kanban in Change Management . . . . . . . . The Challenge: Managing Dependencies Without Burning Out How We Got Started How Our Process Worked How We Continuously Improved What Lessons

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. . . The Elevator Pitch What Is a Concept? What’s the Big Idea? How to Get Going with Concepts Concept Layout Bibliography Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 117 Foreword Kanban is a bit like the Chinese board game Go—a few moments to learn, a lifetime to master. The rules of Go are really simple

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Lean from the Trenches report erratum • discuss Take Charge and Make Changes This book offers four case studies on how three real-world companies used Kanban and Lean thinking to improve time to market, product quality, and cross-department collaboration and teamwork. In all four cases, the companies were well established

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realize they can challenge and improve things that don’t work, even when the problem spans across the organization. This book tells the stories of Kanban implementations in four product-development scenarios from different parts of the value chain. None of the teams involved started from a picture-perfect position. All

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are getting it right during product development. 6. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally. Evolve using problem solving, experiments, and scientific methods. The big idea behind the Kanban method as applied to knowledge work is to improve evolutionarily from the current state using small steps. report erratum • discuss What Is Lean? •7 So

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on new information, because change can be costly. For both hardware and software, time to feedback is a leading indicator of innovation speed. In Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain, early investments in automated tests enabled development teams and idea owners to shift focus and energy from validating what was

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expected to work to whether they were meeting customer expectations. In Using Kanban to Save a Derailing Project, time to feedback for both working solution and individual function was improved by faster test cycles. report erratum • discuss 

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All the case studies in this book started with managers who refused to be victims of their circumstances. They wanted to make a difference. While Kanban helped them see and focus their improvement efforts, the initiatives of the people involved made these improvements happen. Freeing up space report erratum • discuss 

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had a shared language to communicate status. If someone from marketing wanted to know the status of a particular idea, the information was on the Kanban board. report erratum • discuss How We Got Started • 27 Shared Language Across Departments Is Important To address problems early, we need a common vocabulary

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them just because the sprint had finished. It represented a shift from being date-driven to being quality-driven. report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 28 At first, the development teams were cautious about this change. In their view, sprints worked. But they were also

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pulled in as necessary. A specialist may be necessary if the design requires integrating with outside teams, for example. report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 30 During the meeting, the concept owner paints the picture, or describes the idea and walks through the concept. The

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working on an active concept). We pulled in specialized resources, such as system administrators, or outside teams as needed. report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 38 To make sure the standup meeetings ran smoothly, we stuck to a simple agenda. First, we walked the flow

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Sprint demos were replaced by continuous feedback on product fit between the concept owner and the active development team. report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 40 Continuous Feedback If for any reason you are not able to continuously validate the usefulness of a product under

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remarkably simple mechanism that let us track extraordinary events as well situations where teams were pushed in the wrong report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 42 direction (for political or personal reasons). This mechanism replaced time reporting as a tool to learn where the team

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team had already begun taking steps to improve their situation. We decided to tackle the problem together with them on three fronts. First, we introduced Kanban in change management to help them prioritize their workload, gain time to get the quality right, decrease stress, and foster teamwork. Second, we stopped

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things should happen. The process stated that no change could happen as late as four weeks before the release. report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 48 But advances in technology and different risk profiles for systems made people realize that some late changes were not

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through. Use examples to drive home your point. Avoid abstract terminology, because it could invite reinterpretations of your message. report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 50 After failing with our first approach, we changed tactics. We broke the idea into small, concrete steps that could

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had stalled. Were people feeling better about the changes at Company H? The following figure illustrates how people perceived communication at Company H before Enterprise Kanban. Communication revolved around completion of required process artifacts as defined by the individual function. Holistic feedback was returned late, either at system testing or when

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idea is shared with development. Validation of product fit—understanding whether the solution meets most prioritized expectations—happens continuously. report erratum • discuss Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain • 54 Today, conversations tend to be focused on what value we want to create and what problem we need to

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problems even if they’re right under our noses. In this case study, we’ll look at how a company’s change management team adopted Kanban. Using Kanban, managers were able to eliminate stress, build an effective team that took responsibility for the big-picture goals, and work with other teams to

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quality assurance testing. At the same time, both internal development teams and outside vendors were requesting releases more frequently. The team was overwhelmed. Before adopting Kanban, the team managed their work with a ticket system. Each team member got requests for a release, patch, or system change as a ticket and

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focus on other assignments. We called this role “Today’s Backo” (backoffice) and rotated the assignment among all the members. report erratum • discuss Chapter 3. Kanban in Change Management • 64 We struggled with this policy at first because people tended to approach the person they were used to working with instead

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bottom right refers to rejected changes. Not all change requests were well prepared, so some were rejected from the workload. report erratum • discuss Chapter 3. Kanban in Change Management • 66 The highlighted chart in the middle reflects the team’s improvement throughput (tickets designated as improvement initiatives). See how the team

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releasing patches after big releases. Managers could also flag providers who submitted multiple patches instead of bundling them together. These things had gone unnoticed before. Kanban has helped managers learn how their providers work. Let’s hear what the team had to say about the experience. Comparing Now and Before Was

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the flow will come. 4. Celebrate! Recognize the team’s accomplishments and individual member contributions. 5. Help other teams. report erratum • discuss CHAPTER 4 Using Kanban to Save a Derailing Project The first step in solving a problem is seeing that it exists. That sounds simple enough, except in situations where

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move from the customer request to executable software. Visualizing the process also helped flag problem areas. report erratum • discuss How We Got Started • 73 Before Kanban, producing this overview would have required extensive discussions with multiple people and compiling data from different tools. Getting a Shared View on Progress There are

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sprint even though they were incomplete. Even more worrying, those stories resurfaced on the board a few sprints later. report erratum • discuss Chapter 4. Using Kanban to Save a Derailing Project • 74 The PO Test column showed our first bottleneck. The team was quick with development but struggled with testing and

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next sprint focused on a different feature with a higher business value, and the cycle repeated. Because the partially report erratum • discuss Chapter 4. Using Kanban to Save a Derailing Project • 82 finished feature was released, the plan showed progress, but it didn’t match what was actually delivered. There was

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. Other reasons for pushing forward with the change included spotting areas the team could improve, such as bottlenecks and stalled work. We were concerned that Kanban would result in unnecessary overhead, but the positive effects—focus, basic structure, and getting an overview—out- report erratum • discuss How Our Process Worked •

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could shift focus to making improvements. A case in point: managers trained a new team, first-line support, to handle small routine requests. In retrospect, Kanban was instrumental in helping the team grow and handle work efficiently during high peaks of demand as the company expanded. report erratum • discuss Make Your

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work, blockers, upcoming demand, board layout, and improvements. A screen provides a focal point for sparking these conversations in the same way as a physical Kanban board would. report erratum • discuss Part II Appendix APPENDIX 1 Introducing Concepts The Elevator Pitch For one of my clients, 50 percent of the products

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Greenwich, CT, 2014. [Kni11] Henrik Kniberg. Lean from the Trenches. The Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh, NC, and Dallas, TX, 2011. [KS09] Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin. Kanban and Scrum: Making the Most of Both. InfoQueue, http://www.infoq.com, 2009. [Lik04] Jeffrey Liker. The Toyota Way. McGraw-Hill, Emeryville, CA, 2004. [MA12

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, 29 helping other teams, 68 improve collaboratively core principle, 6 rotating assignments, 64, 90 software developers with back office, 92 collaborative design, 29 color, organizing Kanban boards with, 60, 62 commits and avoiding regression errors, 78 common goal, 84 common issues FAQ, 64 communication, see also clarification; trust avoiding surprises, 11

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flow continuous improvement, see also improvement; measurement bank case study, 91–94 change management case study, 64–66 derailed project case study, 79–81 Enterprise Kanban case study, 38–42 experimentation, 9 finding opportunities for, 10–13 in Lean, 8–10 conversation, see communication coordination, explicit, 19, see also dependencies

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principle, 6 long-term thinking, 13– 22 observation based, 48, 54, 91 opportunities for, 10–13, 46–52, 68 pulse, 41 small improvements, 84 improvement Kanban board, 91 Improvement column, 60 improvement pulse, 41 incident managers, standup meetings, 67 information flow decision pace, 18 improving, 7 problem solving, 79 trust, 18

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111 Market Size concept section, 111 market, time to estimating, 108 measuring, 40, 43–45 mean and estimating upper control limits (UCL), 45 meaning, evaluating Kanban boards, 62 measurement bank case study, 91 change management case study, 65–66 customer feedback, 38, 52 Index cycle time, 91 demand type, 91 derailed

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-term thinking model, 13 Other column, 60 overtime, 81 overview, shared bank case study, 94 change management case study, 67 derailed project case study, 72 Kanban boards, 62 need for, 62 workflow visualization, 6 ownership A3 development, 42 collaborative design, 30 concept, ix, 8, 29–30, 105 experiments, 21 standup

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recaps, standup meetings, 38 reflection, 20, 22 regression errors, 77 Reinertsen, Donald, xi releases burndown, 73 change management case study, 59 checklists, 50 fitting on Kanban boards, 61 schedules, 48, 52, 74 validating code commits, 78 Releases column, 60 request-fielding system, 90 requirement specifications, simplifying, 108 resentment, 84 resistance to

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change countering, 11–12, 25–26 long-term thinking, 3 soliciting feedback, 25–26 trust, 13 resources, Kanban and Lean, xi responsibility accountability and trust, 84 experimentation, 20 quality, ix, 8, 100 support questions, 90 visualizing, 58 retrospective meetings, 64, 68, 91 return

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changes, 48, 50 ROI (return on investment), 34–35, 108 root cause analysis, 79 rotating assignments, 63, 90 routines, 88, 92 Routines column, 88 rules, Kanban, 5 S scenario fit, 17 Scenarios concept section, What-If, 112 scientific method, see also experimentation; observations decision making, 10 evolving experimentally core principle, 6

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change management case study, 63 rotating assignments, 63, 90 Surprise concept section, 103 surprises, avoiding, 11, 49 sustaining improvement experiments, 10 syncing ticket system with Kanban board, 64 system administrators, standup meetings, 67 system enablers about, x decision speed, 15, 18 experimental culture, 15, 20–21 fast feedback, 15–16 improving

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time reporting with visualizations, 41 Index sprints, 81, 83 stress and, 75 system testing, 52 time to market estimating, 108 measuring, 40, 43–45 timing Kanban rules, 5 system enablers, 15 Toyota, 4 The Toyota Way, xi tradeoffs concepts, 100, 109–110 decision pace, 18 transcribing and collaborative design, 30 transparency

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. effort, 34 estimating, 35 finding opportunities for improvement, 11 measuring, 40 optimizing for, 8, 22 visualizing value stream, 55 value-adding time concepts, 100 Enterprise Kanban case study, 51–52 value-stream map finding opportunities for improvement, 11 rework, 16 velocity, see throughput vicious cycles, 14 visualization customer feedback, 39 evaluating

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, 62 flow, 6, 25–28, 55 identifying patterns and problems, 67, 84 • 123 improvement Kanban board, 91 information, 18, 41 limiting number of elements, 61 progress, 72–73 ticket system, 58 upper control limits (UCL), 45 value stream, 55 value

Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production

by Taiichi Ohno and Norman Bodek  · 1 Jan 1978  · 167pp  · 44,104 words

Principle Writing the Standard Work Sheet Yourself Teamwork Is Everything The Skill of Passing the Baton An Idea from the U.S. Supermarket What Is Kanban? Incorrect Use Causes Problems The Talent and Courage to Rethink What We Call Common Sense Establishing the Flow Is the Basic Condition Use Your Authority

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. Just-in-time is much more than an inventory reduction system. It is much more that reducing changeover times. It is much more than using kanban orjidoka. It is much more than modernizing the factory. It is, in a sense, like Mr. Ohno says: maki►i>; a_factory operate for

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and productivity of today's workplace. Norman Bodck Chairman, Productivity, Inc. Preface to the English Edition THE TOYOTA PRODUCTION system, under the name of a kanban or a just-in-time system, has become the topic of much conversation in many workplaces and offices. It has been studied and introduced into

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of the Toyota production system. The system is supported by the just-in-time system, already discussed, and autonomation, described in the next section. The kanban method is the means by which the Toyota production system moves smoothly. ► Give the Machine Intelligence The other pillar of the Toyota production system is

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there is no way to hold down or prevent overproduction. " This led to the idea of visual control which then led to the idea of kanban. It was stated in the previous chapter that the Toyota production system is based fundamentally on the absolute elimination of waste. Why is waste generated

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location and nature of trouble situations at a glance. Furthermore, boxes containing parts brought to the side of the production line arrive with an attached kanban, the visual symbol of the Toyota production system. Here, however, I want to discuss the standard work sheet as a means of visual control, which

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of the Toyota production system are just-in-time and automation with a human touch, or autonomation. The tool used to operate the system is kanban, an idea I got from American supermarkets. Following World War II, American products flowed into Japan - chewing gum and Coca-Cola, even the jeep. The

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envelope. This piece of paper carries information that can be divided into three categories: (1) pickup information, (2) transfer information, and (3) production information. The kanban carries the information vertically and laterally within Toyota itself and between Toyota and the cooperating firms. As I said earlier, the idea came from the

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supermarket. Suppose we take kanban into the supermarket. How would it work? Commodities purchased by customers are checked out through the cash register. Cards that carry information about the types

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commodities bought are then forwarded to the purchasing department. Using this information, commodities taken are swiftly replaced by purchasing. These cards correspond to the withdrawal kanban in the Toyota production system. In the supermarket, the commodities displayed in the store correspond to the inventory at the production plant. If a supermarket

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anytime prior to their need - not at the precise time needed - waste cannot be eliminated. In the Toyota production system, overproduction is completely prevented by kanban. As a result, there is no need for extra inventory and, consequently, there is no need for the warehouse and its manager. Generation of countless

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, becomes the autonomic nerve of the production line. Based on this, production workers start work by themselves, and make their own decisions concerning overtime. The kanban system also makes clear what must be done by managers and supervisors. This unquestionably promotes improvement in both work and equipment. The goal of eliminating

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a powerful force to reduce manpower and inventory, eliminate defective products, and prevent the recurrence of breakdowns. It is not an overstatement to say that kanban controls the flow of goods at Toyota. It controls the production of a company exceeding $4.8 billion a year. In this way, Toyota's

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and I admire the attitude they took. I have a good reason for emphasizing the role of top management in discussing the first rule of kanban. There are many obstacles to implementing the rule that the later process must take what it requires from the earlier process when it is needed

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-time" was the most convenient system. However, if used for picking up parts ordered from outside without first changing the production method within the company, kanban immediately becomes a dangerous weapon. Just-in-time is an ideal system in which the items needed arrive at the side of the production line

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question became how to make the exact quantity needed. Then, after the oil crisis, we started teaching outside firms how to produce goods using the kanban system. Prior to that, the Toyota Group guided cooperating firms on work or production methods, in the Toyota system. Outsiders seem to think that the

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. After achieving this, we called the cooperating firms and asked them to study it by watching how it really worked. These people knew nothing about kanban and making them understand it without a textbook was difficult. We asked the cooperating firms from nearby to come, a few at a time, to

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in the Kanto district were supplying their products not only to Toyota but to other companies as well. They felt they could not use the kanban system just with Toyota.z We decided that this would take time for them to understand, and we set out patiently. In the beginning,

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the cooperating firms saw kanban as troublesome. Of course, no top management came; no directors in charge of production or managers of production departments showed up in the beginning. Usually

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would come, but no one very important. At first, I believe, many firms came without knowing what was involved. But we wanted them to understand kanban and if they didn't, Toyota employees would go and help. People from nearby firms understood the system early although they faced resistance in their

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great vision who, without a word, left the operation entirely to me. When I was - rather forcefully -- urging foremen in the production plant to understand kanban, my boss received a considerable number of complaints. They voiced the feeling that this fellow Ohno was doing something utterly ridiculous and should be stopped

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position at times, but even then he must have trusted me. I was not told to stop and for this I am grateful. In 1962, kanban was adopted company-wide; it had earned its recognition. After that, we entered a high-growth period - the timing was excellent. I think the

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gradual spread of kanban made possible the strong production yield. While in charge of the assembly line, I applied the just-intime system there. The most important processes for

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were the earlier processes of machining and body painting. The bodies came from the die press section. The machining process was difficult to connect by kanban to the crude material section but we were satisfied to accumulate experience as we worked to link up the machining process. This period was valuable

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synchronization not only to each production process within the Toyota Motor Company but also to the production processes of the cooperating firms outside Toyota using kanban. Because of this, fluctuations in production and orders at Toyota's final process have a negative impact on all earlier processes. To avoid the occurrence

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order, an order for conveyance or delivery, and as a work order. Rule three ofkanban prohibits picking up or producing goods without a kanban. Rule four requires a kanban to be attached to the goods. Rule five requires 100 percent defect-free products (that is, do not send anything defective to the

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if any process generates defective products; that is, a system in which the process generating defective products feels the pinch. This is indeed where the kanban system is unrivaled. Processes producing in a just-in-time system do not need extra inventory. So, if the prior process generates defective parts, the

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to successful implementation of automation. Only with this foundation can production leveling be effective. It takes a great effort to practice the six rules of kanban discussed above. In reality, practicing these rules means nothing less than adopting the Toyota production system as the management system of the whole company. Introducing

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or carried to the assembly line on it. Of course, it goes without saying that no part can be hung on the conveyor without a kanban on the hanger. When many types of parts are carried by this chain conveyer, indicators designating the parts needed are attached to the hangers at

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idea of just-in-time penetrated broadly and deeply into the production field, and as adherence to the rules in creased through the use of kanban. As I thought about the business organization and the autonomic nerves in the human body, the concepts began to interconnect, overlap, and stir my imagination

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soon as they can see the car. If the car is not visible because it is blocked by equipment or pillars, information is passed by kanban in the following way: Suppose bumpers are being assembled on the main line in Process A. Let's call the process where bumpers are prepared

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of bumper goes on Car 6. Therefore, the process on the main assembly line assembling Car 6 gives the information to Process A on a kanban. No other information is needed. Computers could relay such information to each process when it is needed. Setting up the computers, however, requires equipment and

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line must be able to respond to schedule changes. In reality, however, the information system and production constraints make change difficult. An important characteristic of kanban is that within certain limits it makes fine adjustments automatically. A line does not have detailed schedules beforehand and so does not know what type

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of car to assemble until the kanban is removed and read. For example, it anticipates four Car A's and six Car B's for a total of 10 cars. But

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ratios, however, do not cause someone to run around announcing the change. It happens simply because the production process follows the information carried by the kanban. Kanban's value is that it allows this degree of change to be handled automatically. If we ignore market fluctuations and fail to make adjustments accordingly

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circumstances, is how things are done under a controlled (or planned) economy. I don't believe the fine adjustments in production made possible by using kanban will work in controlled economies where initial production plans never vary. ► Coping with Changes The term "fine adjustment" has a hidden meaning that should be

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rush and not take time to correct a problem causes work loss later." I also say, "Wait for the right opportunity." These ideas developed from kanban, the tool that kept us from failure and misjudgment. I believe the role of fine adjustments is not only to indicate whether a schedule change

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totally eliminating the overproduction generated by inventory and costs related to workers, land, and facilities needed for managing inventory. To achieve this, we practice the kanban system in which a later process goes to an earlier process to withdraw parts needed just in time. To make certain the earlier process produces

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for storing extra raw materials and finished products. But what should we do if the machine stops and production requirements cannot be met? Under the kanban system, what would happen if the later process went to the earlier process to pick up needed goods and found the machine down and the

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Raised in the High-Growth Period TOWARD THE END of 1955, Japan entered a period of high growth rare for the time in world economics. Kanban, the operating tool of the Toyota production system, was adopted company-wide in 1962, when Japan was well into its growth. It is significant that

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the kanban system with its roots at Toyota coincided with this period of time. As soon as Japan entered the high-growth period and courageously called for

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established the basis of rationalization with its production method. Its challenge was the total elimination of waste by using the just-in-time system and kanban. For every problem, we must have a specific countermeasure. A vague statement that waste should be eliminated, or that there are too many workers, will

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within the Toyota Motor Company, between the company and its affiliates, and also between the processes in each affiliate. In addition, there is the signal kanban used in the stamping process, for instance, where production of a specific quantity, perhaps more than required by just-in-time, cannot be avoided. ► Labor

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is always clearly visible. This idea applies to machines and the line as well as to the arrangement of goods and tools, inventory, circulation of kanban, standard work procedures, and so on. In production lines using the Toyota production system, visual control, or management by sight, is enforced. ► Waste Recognition and

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to position TPM to support and complement other strategic manufacturing improvement initiatives. ISBN 1-56327-087-0 / 224 pages / $45.00 / Order IMPTPM-B163 Integrating Kanban with MRPII Automating a Pull System for Enhanced JIT Inventory Management Raymond S. Louis Manufacturing organizations continuously strive to match the supply of products to

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further to reduce changeover time and optimize staffing at the same time. ISBN 0-915299-38-0 / 315 pages / $75.00 / Order KAIZEN-B1 63 Kanban and Just-In-Time at Toyota Management Begins at the Workplace Japan Management Association / Translated by David J. Lu Toyota's world-renowned success proves

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that with kanban, the Just-In-Time production system (JIT) makes most other manufacturing practices obsolete. This simple but powerful classic is based on seminars given by JIT

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Productive Maintenance. Each approach is supported by Productivity's wide array of team-based tools: Standardization, One-Piece Flow, Hoshin Planning, Quick Changeover, Mistake-Proofing, Kanban, Problem Solving with CEDAC, Visual Workplace, Visual Office, Autonomous Maintenance, Equipment Effectiveness, Design of Experiments, Quality Function Deployment, and more. Productivity is known for significant

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow

by Dominica Degrandis and Tonianne Demaria  · 14 May 2017  · 153pp  · 45,721 words

2.3 Expose Dependencies Figure 11. Physical Dependency Matrix Figure 12. Arts & Crafts Dependency Board Figure 13. Dependency Swimlane Board Figure 14. Dependency Tags on Kanban Cards Figure 15. Show Dependencies Between Different Teams Figure 16. Exercise Example 2.4 Commiting the Perfect Crime—Unplanned Work Figure 17. A Study in

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is why we need a pull system—in which people can focus on one thing long enough to finish it before starting something new—like kanban. Kanban is a visual pull system based on constraints that allow workers to pull work when they have availability instead of work being pushed onto them

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Agile development focused on cross-functional, collaborative, and time-boxed activities to build features. As Darren Davis writes in his blog “The Secret History of Kanban,” David’s methods “...eliminated explicit estimation from the process, and relied on data to provide a probabilistic means of determining when software was likely to

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decided to try something different. I got a job with AT&T Mobile on their program management team. But the regression from using the Lean kanban approach I helped create at Corbis to using a Waterfall approach (a traditional software development method where work waits until all the parts of the

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New England Research and Development Center in Boston. Originally, I set off to write a reference for students to use during workshops while designing their kanban boards. Later, this piece grew into a time-saving reference for me as well. It became a place to capture not only everything I learned

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about applying Lean, kanban, and flow practices to my own work, but also selected equations, theories, and stats from thought leaders. For example, how to define Lean? For

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will beat a good person every time.”5 This book is simultaneously an explanation, a how-to guide, and a business justification for using Lean, kanban, and flow methods to increase the speed and effectiveness of work. Everything in this book may not apply to your specific situation. It has an

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inefficient from a customer perspective to prioritize starting new work over finishing the things you have already begun. If I’m writing a blog about kanban and the next step in the process is to have it edited by someone on the Marketing team, then beginning a new blog about DevOps

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before incorporating Marketing’s edits for the kanban blog means I’ll have to deal with a context switch when the editor gets back to me. Quality suffers: Quality suffers from too much

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that, very simply, signals your availability to do some work. When you pull a card from the backlog onto the in-progress area of your kanban board, you commit to being available to do the work that the card represents. Figure 2. Prep Implement Feedback Board The number of cards under

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focus on urgent unplanned work. Unplanned work steals time away from planned work. Unplanned work is hard to see, but it can be made visible. Kanban helps to combat and better anticipate unplanned work by making work visible. Plan for unplanned work by reserving capacity for when it arrives. Focus is

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system that efficiently and effectively addresses and manages the core issues caused by the five thieves by making work visible and smoothing out workflow: Lean kanban flow. As stated in the introduction, the rest of this book is simultaneously an explanation, a how-to guide, and a business justification for seeing

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it. This section is a starting point for making your and your team’s work visible. I’ll be discussing different aspects of creating a kanban board as well as different ideas and concepts that help in understanding why they are important in the larger context of your work. The goal

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everyone, including ourselves—and begin fixing the time-thief problem. You just have to jump in and start doing it to reap the benefits. And kanban boards are all about jumping in because they start with an amazingly simple core—the To Do, Doing, Done design (Figure 5). The genius of

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The work is represented by the work item cards. In Figure 5, the blue squares represent work item cards. So, how does this kind of kanban board act in real-world action at your work? First, there are some things to take into consideration. For instance, if you have a to

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capacity for making team improvements. When you define your work item type categories, you are creating a legend to help your team work with a kanban board effectively. It also allows others, from management to other teams, to interpret the board when they see it. Once you list the work

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items that are pain points for your team. As you do all this, keep in mind that there is no sense in over engineering a kanban board design up front. Keep it simple. If extra granularity is needed, it will become self-evident through usage. Once you have your current

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time to rant about the things you usually just mutter about. Come on, get it out. Shining a light on these bottlenecks in your Lean kanban flow design will help make it possible for you to begin to fix the pain. Next, list out your customer and/or business pain points

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categories of work. Discuss which work type seems to cause the biggest problem. Why is it a source of issues? This will be your working kanban board to use throughout Part 2 of this book. KEY TAKEAWAYS Visual-spatial learners think in pictures rather than in words. They have a different

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patterns and structures in what is perceived through vision. Visuals can show business pain points and other hidden information. We can use visual systems like kanban boards to help make work visible. Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time. —Steve Uzzell 2.2

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opinions they take seriously. (We do stuff for leadership to reduce fear of public humiliation or of getting canned.) Horizontal swimlanes are sometimes added to kanban boards for extra visibility or as a way to set up WIP limits. Swimlanes are lanes dedicated for a particular kind of work to flow

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limits per work item type, per swimlane, or per column are common options. WIP limits per person are sometimes the first step folks new to kanban take in order to stem the bleeding of overburdened people. More advanced teams set WIP limits at team levels in order to optimize workflow at

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work through the lens of flow improves team communication and understanding. Speaking of visualizing work, I am reminded of the visual language that occurs with kanban board designs. The “pictures” on the board (the board structure, card avatars, icons, and symbols) are easily received information. We need very little education to

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dependencies: Use cross-functional team stand-ups to flag dependencies. Identify dependencies using a dependency matrix. Implement explicit rules for work flowing between different team kanban boards. Create a rotating dependency scout role—an enterprise-wide system architect who knows the system inside and out. The idea of using cross-functional

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appeal to you or are not accessible to you, then take a look at Figure 13 which shows another way to visualize dependencies via your kanban board using a swimlane of its own. Figure 13. Dependency Swimlane Board Design your board(s) to keep Thief Unknown Dependencies far away as

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shown in Figure 14. Figure 14. Dependency Tags on Kanban Cards Or, visually call out dependencies between different teams so they can be broadcasted widely to reduce expensive business pain. Figure 15. Show Dependencies Between

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Thief Unknown Dependencies far away. Visually call out dependencies so they can be broadcasted widely to reduce expensive business pain. Visualize dependencies between different teams’ kanban boards. Organize around product teams to reduce the problems associated with projects. In these times I don’t, in a manner of speaking, know what

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of these may be scary to see, but once they’re out in the open, the problems can begin to get fixed. As mentioned before, kanban may scare away the meek but is well suited for those with the courage to face issues, adapt to change, and fix problems. Figure 19

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have too many top priorities to achieve the level of focus they need in order to succeed. Time: 60 minutes MATERIALS: Your current workflow or kanban board INSTRUCTIONS: Ensure those impacted have a voice in the discussion. Time-box each person’s comments to no more than five minutes. Questions to

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more than a second before people respond with, “The Validate queue!” Figure 27. The Validate Pit This is the power of the unified language of kanban boards—the message is communicated instantaneously. Because the bottleneck lies in Validate, we must tackle the Validate queue first. Here’s the experiment we did

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your context and pass by what doesn’t. Multilevel Board Design In the same way that cross-team boards make hand-offs visible, multi-level kanban designs make multiple projects and cross-functional teamwork visible. A multilevel board design provides a big-picture view from the portfolio level to the team

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of ways to visualize repetitive tasks. I’m inspired by the sequestering approach that Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry describe in their book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life.2 It’s a simple, yet elegant approach designed to handle repetitive tasks that can clutter your board. I’ve taken

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again and again to keep track of all the small repetitive tasks required to do training. Separate repetitive tasks in a dedicated area of your kanban board. It’s important to keep these tasks visible because they increase WIP, and their impact should be acknowledged. Remember Operations Manager Erik from Section

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a PO. The Waiting on Approval and PO columns bring visibility to work that is sitting idle while waiting on Finance. Remember, the goal of kanban is to make problems visible so they can be fixed. In this example, the time the work spends waiting on Finance can be measured and

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was stolen. Figure 45. The Original Time Thief O’Gram The Time Thief O’Gram can be generated by tagging all your thieves on your kanban board. In this example, each thief has been color coded to make it even more visual. Once you have all these tagged, you can

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them. Figure 47. Balanced Scorecard In my work, I am frequently asked about the best way to influence the CIO to use a DevOps/Lean/kanban/whatever approach. The CIOs I’ve talked to want two things: less risk and more predictability. The Time Thief O’Gram shows you that. It

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votes on a single topic or distribute them across two different topics. Tally the votes to prioritize the topics. Then, run the topics through a kanban board right on top of the table. Three columns are essential: To Discuss, Discuss, and Done. Place the topic with the highest number of

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Lean Coffee allows people to discuss the topics they want in a fun, respectful, and efficient setting. Organize and flow Lean Coffee topics through a kanban once they have been voted on. Using a board to show the status of work allows stand-up time to be spent discussing problems and

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that increase wait times and lengthen queues. Individually Named Swimlanes Figure 50 shows the results of a team subjected to begrudgingly using their boss’s kanban board design. Figure 50. Individually Named Swimlanes The boss mandated this board design, carving out swimlanes for individual team members. He wanted visibility on what

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gaze upon, but not when surrounded by colors that are at visual war with each other or with the background. Beauty attracts. Design your visual kanban user experience with beauty in mind. Author of three bestselling books on visualizing information and TED talk speaker David McCandless identifies four elements he believes

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directions given by someone else who has done it many times before. The first time doing anything is an experiment. And so it is with kanban. The first board design attempt is an experiment to help you discover how to improve your workflow. That’s why there really are no “best

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practices” when it comes to designing your kanban board, as well as many other situations. Unless you are doing something simple that has been done many times before—something where cause and effect

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the only (or best) way to do them. Consider replacing Gantt charts with queues. Beware of individually named swimlanes. Simplify meeting tools whenever possible. Make kanban boards (and other presentation materials) visually appealing to engage viewers. Best practices have their place, particularly when it comes to simple routine tasks, but it

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is it worth it? There has to be some win in order to disrupt the team. Next, my two questions are: Why do you need kanban if your teams already have high throughput? What’s the problem that you want to make visible? I would have to make a lot of

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make small adjustments so you can measure the impact of each change and learn from it. Expecting overnight results. It can take months for a kanban design to stabilize. Even then, you will be continually improving. There is always room for improvement. As a Lean coach, I often get asked what

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are different. Differences include release cadence, roles, and the type of constraints themselves. Scrum uses a time-box (usually two weeks) to limit demand, while kanban uses the WIP limit to constrain demand. Some teams use a hybrid of both and call it ScrumBan (originally designed as a way to transition

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people to catch on, but it resulted in a system that was ultimately safer and faster. The same is true when moving to a Lean kanban flow approach. It’s new and different. People think it won’t work, and there is resistance across teams and departments. Culture change is

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it by dividing work time by work + wait time. GANTT CHART: The illustration of the start and finish dates of all steps in a project. KANBAN: Japanese word for visual signal; used throughout this book to refer to a visual management pull system for knowledge work. KINGMAN’S FORMULA: Used to

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, “The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch,” UIE, August 7, 2006, https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/. 2. Klaus Leopold and Siegfried Kaltenecker, Kanban Change Leadership: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015), 277. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have written Making Work Visible without the support

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Work Visible has been a way for me to consolidate and reflect on the things I’ve learned while teaching and coaching teams on Lean, kanban, and flow—any colleagues and friends have influenced me over the course of my career while learning my trade whom I’d like to thank

Scala in Action

by Nilanjan Raychaudhuri  · 27 Mar 2012

for monads 5.8. Summary 2. Working with Scala Chapter 6. Building web applications in functional style 6.1. Building weKanban: a simple web-based Kanban board 6.2. Building Scala applications using Simple Build Tool 6.2.1. Setting up SBT 6.2.2. Understanding the basics of SBT 6

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to the database 7.1.3. Building the Create Story web page 7.2. Building the Kanban board page 7.2.1. Creating the view for the Kanban board 7.2.2. Moving cards in the Kanban board 7.3. Summary Chapter 8. Building scalable and extensible components 8.1. Building your first

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module. But the application you set out to build in chapter 6 won’t be complete by chapter’s end because to build a functional Kanban application, your application needs to store information such as stories and its status information into persistent storage. In chapter 7 you will complete the weKanban

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web application in Scala. 6.1. Building weKanban: a simple web-based Kanban board You’re going to build a simple web-based Kanban[1] board. The word Kanban is derived from the Japanese language and it means “card-signal.” In Kanban, the card-signaling is used to trigger action for new work. This

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mechanism is also known as a pull system because new work is pulled in only when there’s available capacity to handle the work. 1 “Kanban,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban. The essential idea behind

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the Kanban system is limiting the work in progress.[2] Stop starting and start finishing is an important mantra aimed at reducing

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visualize the work in progress for user stories and backlog, and to determine who is working on what. But card walls aren’t necessarily a Kanban system unless there’s an explicit limit on work in progress and a signaling system to pull new work. 2 David J. Anderson

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, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, Blue Hole Press, April 7, 2010. The Kanban board you’ll build (figure 6.1) has this limit in place for the ready, dev, and test

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have more than three stories in the ready state; similarly, you can have 2 stories at the most in the dev phase. Figure 6.1. Kanban board with four phases. According to figure 6.1, you can move one more story from the ready phase to the dev phase. A pair

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the deploy phase, which means it’s ready for production deployment. This is how a card (work) flows through the system. You’ll name your Kanban application weKanban, and here are the user stories you’ll implement: As a customer, I want to create a new user story so I can

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both a request and response of type scala.collection.Stream (discussed in the previous section). The application class you’re going to use is com.kanban.application.WeKanbanApplication. When the Scalaz servlet is initialized, the application class that’s passed as an init-param will be instantiated. Let’s save this

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compositions at length. After putting all these pieces together, your application looks like the following listing. Listing 6.3. WeKanban application so far package com.kanban.application import scalaz._ import Scalaz._ import scalaz.http._ import response._ import request._ import servlet._ import HttpServlet._ import Slinky._ final class WeKanbanApplication extends StreamStreamServletApplication { val application

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the Scalaz HTTP module. But the application you set out to build in the previous chapter wasn’t complete. The reason: to build a functional Kanban application, your application needs to store information such as stories and its status into persistent storage. Note This chapter is an extension of chapter 6

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manner. You’ll build a new screen for adding new stories to the application and a screen that displays all the stories added to the Kanban board. In the process of building these screens, you’ll explore how to work with databases from Scala applications. Even though the focus of the

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. Listing 7.1. Complete weKanban build.sbt project definition By now you know what you have to do to update your SBT dependencies. For your Kanban board the story should have three attributes: a story number that identifies the story uniquely, a title describing the story, and the phase the story

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keep all the data definitions of an application. The following code defines the schema with a table called “STORIES” for your Story class: package com.kanban.models import org.squeryl._ object KanbanSchema extends Schema { val stories = table[Story]("STORIES") } Save this as the file KanbanSchema.scala under src/main/scala/com

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/kanban/models. One thing to note here is I’m defining the table in a type-safe manner. The stories value now represents the database table “

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object for Story to create new story instances. The default phase for a new story is “Ready,” because that’s the first phase in the Kanban board. The tx method in the previous code snippet makes sure that the Squeryl SessionFactory is initialized properly and starts a new transaction if no

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Story web page In this section you’ll build the screen with which the user will create a new story and add it to the Kanban board. You’ll also hook your Story model object with the input from the screen and complete the following feature of the weKanban application: As

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a new Story screen To create the screen in figure 7.2, see the following listing to create a CreateStory object under src/main/com/kanban/views. Listing 7.6. CreateStory view object Here, in the apply method of the view object, you have the necessary HTML that when rendered will

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the error condition. You’re done adding new stories to the Kanban board. Next you’ll build the Kanban board where all the stories will be displayed. 7.2. Building the Kanban board page Now the focus will move to building the Kanban board. Your next user story: As a developer I want to

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move cards (stories) from one phase to another so that I can signal progress. Figure 6.1 shows the prototype of the Kanban board you’re supposed to build. To implement this story, you have to provide an ability to move cards from one phase to another. For

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example, a user of your Kanban board should be able to move a card from ready phase to development phase and vice versa. To implement drag-and-drop, use the jQuery

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when a story moves from one phase to another. The next listing shows the completed main.js file that implements drag-and-drop for the Kanban board. Listing 7.9. Implementing drag-and-drop for the weKanban board in the main.js file In the init function you’re making the

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passing both the story number and target phase. Now you’ll create the view object for the Kanban board and the JavaScript code. 7.2.1. Creating the view for the Kanban board To create the Kanban board view you have to retrieve all the stories from the database by phase. You have

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moment you try to access the first element in the collection. But because you’re going to use this collection to render stories in your Kanban board view, let’s change this to strict collection from lazy collection (covered in chapter 4) by invoking the map method, so that you access

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findAllByPhase method by passing various phases to render the stories in the Kanban board. To create the view for the Kanban board, add a new view object under src/main/scala/com/kanban/views/ KanbanBoard.scala. package com.kanban.views import com.kanban.models._ object KanbanBoard { } The first thing you’ll do is add a

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returns a list of scala.xml.NodeSeq objects that you can easily insert into the body of HTML you’re going to generate for the Kanban board. To tie all these pieces together, add the apply method to the KanbanBoard view object, which will create the

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Kanban board view, shown in the following listing. Listing 7.10. Kanban board view The KanbanBoard view object is used to render the Kanban board in figure 7.4. Like the CreateStory view object, the apply method is

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responsible for rendering the Kanban board. The apply method calls the header method to add all the

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JavaScript files you need to add drag-and-drop functionality to your Kanban board. The contents of the header method get inserted in between the HTML

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head tags. Figure 7.4. Kanban board with stories in ready phase To render stories in each phase, the apply method invokes

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the stories method by passing the phase. The stories method is invoked for each phase in the Kanban board. The stories method uses a for-comprehension to generate the HTML required to render the result. The findAllByPhase method in the Story model class

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the database. The last missing piece is to modify the handle method in the WeKanbanApplication class to handle the /kanban/board URL. Add the following case to the handle method: case MethodParts(GET, "kanban" :: "board" :: Nil) => Some(OK(ContentType, "text/html") << transitional << KanbanBoard()) If you rebuild and run the application again (if

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you’re running ~prepare-webapp, the changes will be available to you automatically), the link “Go to Kanban board” will take you to the Kanban board screen displaying all the stories you created (figure 7.4). Even though you haven’t implemented the move card functionality on

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. To complete the move card story, you have to implement the move card logic in the server side. 7.2.2. Moving cards in the Kanban board To implement moving cards from one phase to another, you have to update the phase of the story. For example, to move a story

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the package build action to create a WAR file deployable to any web container. You’ve implemented the most basic features of a web-based Kanban board. You can easily extend the application to make it more sophisticated. 7.3. Summary In chapters 6 and 7 you took your first step

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in Java AnyRef AnyVal Application trait application.conf file application-context.xml file applications connecting to databases saving to using Squeryl creating web pages for Kanban boards creating views for defined moving cards in setting up project with SBT SBT adding dependencies build file for for Mac for Unix for Windows

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. See ACID. Awaitility B BalancingDispatcher BasicDBObject() method, 2nd BasicResponseHandler() method Bean property @BeanProperty annotation beEqualTo matcher behavior-driven development specifications for using Specs2 board example, Kanban creating view for moving cards in BookOrdering object Boolean parameter BTaxStrategy Budd, Timothy build file, for SBT build.properties file, 2nd, 3rd build.sbt file

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) CMSClassUnloadingEnabled flag codomain collection.immutable.List, 2nd collection.mutable.ListBuffer, 2nd collection.mutable.Map package collection.mutable.Set[String]() method com.akkaoogle.http.App com.kanban.application.WeKanbanApplication com.mongodb package com.mongodb.Mongo class com.scalainaction.mongo package com.typesafe.play.mini.Setup Common Language Runtime. See CLR. companion objects

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. See JSON. JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) jetty-run build action jettyVersion jquery-ui library JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) JUnit, test-driven development using junitInterface K Kanban boards board defined setting up project with SBT example creating view for moving cards in view object KanbanBoard() method KanbanSchema class, 2nd KanbanSchema.scala file

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collection Vector() method views views.index() method W WAR file weather function web applications connecting to databases saving to using Squeryl creating web pages for Kanban boards creating view for defined moving cards in setting up project with SBT SBT adding dependencies build file for for Mac for Unix for Windows

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this case only for 1 and 3. Compare this figure with figure 5.1. Chapter 6. Building web applications in functional style Figure 6.1. Kanban board with four phases. Figure 6.2. SBT project structure Figure 6.3. WeKanban project structure Figure 6.4. The way HTTP requests are handled

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Figure 7.2. The Create a new Story screen Figure 7.3. The weKanban project with JavaScript files for drag-and-drop Figure 7.4. Kanban board with stories in ready phase Chapter 8. Building scalable and extensible components Figure 8.1. Ordering system with three components: order, inventory, and shipping

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.8. Complete save story in WeKanbanApplication Listing 7.9. Implementing drag-and-drop for the weKanban board in the main.js file Listing 7.10. Kanban board view Listing 7.11. Complete Story model implementation Listing 7.12. Completed WeKanbanApplication class Chapter 8. Building scalable and extensible components Listing 8.1

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport  · 2 Mar 2021  · 350pp  · 90,898 words

instead defines a general approach that is realized by multiple different specific systems. Two of the more popular systems at the moment are Scrum and Kanban, which, if you have any involvement with software, are terms you’ve at the very least heard mentioned. Generally speaking, Scrum breaks work down into

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sprints, where a team dedicates itself completely to delivering a particular update before moving on to the next. Kanban, by contrast, emphasizes a more continuous flow of tasks through a fixed set of phases, with a general goal of minimizing the current works in

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bottlenecks. Which brings us back to boards. When you look past the low-level details of their implementation, you’ll notice that what Scrum and Kanban share is the use of a task board in which cards corresponding to tasks are stacked vertically in columns corresponding to phases of the software

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column in the corresponding subdirectory—simplifying the task of finding this information when the time comes. Task Board Practice #2: When in Doubt, Start with Kanban’s Default Columns Once you leave the comfort of the entrenched guidelines surrounding the use of task boards in software development, it’s not necessarily

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obvious how to set them up for your specific knowledge work context. When in doubt, start with the default setup from the Kanban methodology, which includes just three columns: to do, doing, and done. You can then elaborate this foundation as needed. On Devesh’s boards, for example

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, he had a column for design tasks and a column for implementing client campaigns. This modification to the Kanban defaults proved useful in the context of his marketing firm because design and implementation work pull from two different pools of employees. The Flow boards

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deploy the simpler setup of a single column dedicated to all tasks being executed for the project at the moment. Another useful expansion of the Kanban defaults is to include a column for storing background notes and research generally relevant to a project. This hack technically breaks the convention that every

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shift of discussion toward card conversations. To avoid the need to wrangle an always-filling inbox is a benefit that shouldn’t be underestimated. Personal Kanban: Organizing Your Professional Life with Individual Task Boards Jim Benson thinks a lot about improving knowledge work. His consulting firm, Modus Cooperandi, specializes in building

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.5 In personal productivity circles, however, Benson is better known for a slim volume that he self-published back in 2011. It’s titled Personal Kanban, and it offers a seductive promise: the agile methodologies that help teams make sense of complex projects can be used to tame the complex mess

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of obligations in your individual professional life. The core ideas behind Personal Kanban are simple enough that Benson can summarize them in a five-minute video that he features on the book’s website.6 In the video

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” apart and think through all these different obligations just to figure out what we should do next. “That’s not fun,” Benson concludes. The Personal Kanban solution to this problem is to organize this mess of expectations with a personal task board. Benson suggests using three columns. The first is labeled

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to the tasks that you’re actually working on right now. The key to this column—and a big part of the secret sauce of Kanban systems in general—is that you should maintain a strict limit on how many tasks you’re allowed to be doing at any given time

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. In Kanban-speak, this is called the works in progress (WIP) limit. In the video, Benson sets this limit to three. As he explains, if you instead

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implies, the psychological boost of physically moving the Post-it from doing to done is a powerful motivator. In the years since Benson published Personal Kanban, the system has gathered a cult following. A YouTube search reveals countless homemade videos from fans explaining their own takes on Benson’s approach to

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column, allowing him, at a quick glance, to get a sense of how he has recently been allocating his time.8 * * * — The success of Personal Kanban among productivity aficionados underscores an important reality for anyone looking to escape the hyperactive hive mind: task boards are not just effective for coordinating work

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) for the computer science department at Georgetown. Following Jim Benson’s basic structure, I have doing and done columns. Following the lead of the Personal Kanban community, I also deploy my own custom blend of columns for making sense of the tasks I plan to work on but am not actively

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practices for making individual task boards work well for you. Individual Task Board Practice #1: Use More Than One Board Many proponents of the Personal Kanban approach deploy a single board to make sense of all the tasks in their professional life. I recommend something slightly different: maintain a separate board

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. Modus Cooperandi website, https://moduscooperandi.com, accessed September 22, 2020. 6. Thrive, the official blog of Personal Kanban, http://personalkanban.com/pk/. 7. Alexie Zheglov and Gerry Kirk, “Lean Coffee or an Introduction to Personal Kanban,” Agile Tour Toronto 2012 session, YouTube video, 1:40, https://youtu.be/aOrfRhcD6ms. 8. Bradley Miller

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, “Personal Kanban Scheduling Board,” March 4, 2018, YouTube video, 7:46, https://youtu.be/tTdbcoTlljQ. 9. I long ago

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, 164 explanation of, 156–58 for software development, 155–57, 163, 222, 234–35 and using task boards, 157–58, 160–61, 209 See also Kanban; Scrum Alex (healthcare executive), 153–55 Alexa, 252 algorithms, 42, 47, 79, 81 Allen, David, 56–58, 255 Alphabet, 235 Amazon, 81 Amtel, 67 Amusing

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, 170 Journal of Applied Psychology, The, 24 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, The, 45 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The, 52 journalists, 30, 58 Kanban, 157, 159–60, 163–67 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 67 Kenya, 47–49 Kirsner, Scott, 196 Knapp, Jake, 235–37, 239 knowledge sector automatic processes for, 170

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–xix, 46–47, 84–88 paperwork, 6, 22 Paterson, Michael, 80 Pentland, Alex, 49–51, 54 Perlow, Leslie, 37, 39, 82–84 Personal Kanban, 163–67 Personal Kanban (Benson), 164–65 Pivotal Labs, 223 Postman, Neil, 73–74, 257–58, 260–61 PowerPoint, 218 pre-industrial past, 85–86 predictable time off

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–55, 157–58 digital versions of, 154–62 discussions/meetings for, 153–55, 169 group review meetings for, 160–61, 244 for individuals, 163–70 Kanban default columns and, 159–60 physical versions of, 153–55, 159 processes suited to, 171 solo review meetings for, 166, 168 for tracking in hospital

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford  · 14 Jul 2013  · 395pp  · 110,994 words

. This is a critical part of the First Way, which is creating fast flow of work through Development and IT Operations. Index cards on a kanban board is one of the best mechanisms to do this, because everyone can see WIP. Now you must continually eradicate your largest sources of unplanned

…

bottleneck. That was his real-life Herbie. “Fully two decades after The Goal was published,” he continues, “David J. Anderson developed techniques of using a kanban board to release work and control WIP for Development and IT Operations. You may find that of interest. You and Penelope are close with your

…

change board to a kanban board that can manage flow. “So, here’s your homework,” he says. “Figure out how to set the tempo of work according to Brent. Once

…

,” “Doing,” and “Done.” Interesting. This looks vaguely familiar. “What is this? Another change board?” Patty breaks out into a grin and says, “It’s a kanban board. After our last meeting, I went to MRP-8 myself. I was so curious about this work center notion that I had to see

…

that I’ve worked with before, and he spent an hour with me showing how they managed the flow of work.” Patty explains that a kanban board, among many other things, is one of the primary ways our manufacturing plants schedule and pull work through the system. It makes demand and

…

WIP visible, and is used to signal upstream and downstream stations. “I’m experimenting with putting kanbans around our key resources. Any activities they work on must go through the kanban. Not by e-mail, instant message, telephone, or whatever. “If it’s not on the

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kanban board, it won’t get done,” she says. “And more importantly, if it is on the kanban board, it will get done quickly. You’d be amazed at how fast work is getting completed, because we’re

…

and lanes of work, just like I did for my service requests. Maybe we can even get rid of some of this scheduling, and create kanban boards instead. Our engineers could then take any card from the Ready column, move them to Doing, until they’re Done!” Unfortunately, I can’t

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that he’s onboard, okay?” “Already on it,” she replies quickly. “In fact, I have a meeting with him later today to discuss putting a kanban around Brent, to further isolate him from our daily crises. I want to formalize how Brent gets work and increase our ability to standardize what

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off on three-hour tours, and months later, we wonder why none of them come back.” Patty says, “I wonder if we could create a kanban lane for each of these ‘tasks?’” “Yes, that’s it,” I say. “Erik was right. You’ve just found a big pile of recurring work

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a manufacturing plant. Every flow of work goes through it, and you can’t ship the product without it. Suddenly, I know exactly what the kanban should look like.” Over the next forty-five minutes, we create our plan. Patty is going to work with Wes’ team to assemble the top

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tasks waiting in queues or handoffs. This will make sure it doesn’t happen again. “Eventually,” she adds, “I’ll want to move all the kanbans, so that we don’t need a person acting as the signaling mechanism for work handoffs. Don’t worry. I’ll have it figured out

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I see the IT world now and how differently it looks to me than even a couple of months ago. Patty’s experiments with establishing kanbans around Brent are a success. We’re also finding instances of work going backward to Brent, because we didn’t understand or didn’t sufficiently

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module?” “It’s one of Sarah’s projects that we released after the project freeze was lifted,” he replies. “It was before we put the kanban around Brent. It was a database schema change that slipped through the cracks.” I swear under my breath. Sarah again? Chris has a pinched expression

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