A Short And Sweet Introduction To Kanban

Kanban Product Development is a Lean Manufacturing Technique that can be applied to software development. Kanban is a scheduling system rather than a project management methodology. Kanban was developed by Toyota in the 1940s, but has since been adopted across many industries. It is now being used heavily within the IT industry for IT service management and more specifically – Software Development.

The key principles of Kanban are:

1) Visualize the workflow of work items through limiting WIP (Work In Progress) of each step in the workflow, providing transparency into where work items are at any point in time.

2) Manage flow = improving predictability which creates bottlenecks/delays, so keep these to a minimum.

3) Limit WIP to improve predictability, maintain flow and reduce delays.

4) Make process policies explicit.

The first two practices are really about limiting WIP, which is basically about prioritising work, managing queues and having capacity for different types of work at different stages in the workflow. The third one makes this clear by placing work items on a board, Kanban style – see figure 1 below for an example of how it might look.

The final principle makes sure that it doesn’t become just another thing that takes up your time but actually helps you deliver more value working using software development methodologies like Scrum for short sprints with check-ins every day/week/whatever works for you.

There are several tools out there for Scrumban, including paper boards and sticky notes, but the most popular choice is Jira . It’s probably the best known tool for software development teams, which makes it well worth considering if you’re looking to implement Scrum.

Some people have said that their daily stand-ups take too long so they don’t do them. This is a problem with the way some people run them as a status meeting more than anything else. If you want to keep your check-ins short and focused, try reading this before next time: ” How I Run My Stand-up Meetings “.

In fact, some organisations have cut their stand-up meetings down to just the actionable and relevant bits, without any of the “what I did yesterday” filler. Why not try that for a few weeks and see if they’re more useful? Remember: the who, what, why and how of stand-up meetings is up to you!

What’s really important about Scrum is that you keep everyone on the team informed about what’s going on. It’s very easy for individuals to get side-tracked and start working on things that might not help achieve the team’s common goal (or sprint commitment). By having regular reviews (sprint demos), this problem can be quickly identified and solved before too much time has been wasted.

The Scrum Master acts as an intermediary between the team and any other force that might have an impact on it. This could be a manager who has been asking too many questions, or a product owner who keeps changing their mind about what’s important. The role of a scrum master is to resolve any conflicts within a way that still helps the sprint deadline .

Making sure everyone understands what they’re supposed to be doing during each part of the project is vital if you want to make this plan work for your team. It can take some time but once people start working together more efficiently, you’ll know it was worth the effort.

When you’re starting a new project it’s important to make sure everyone is clear about what they need to do and how they can help each other. The more questions that get answered during the planning stage, the less chance there is of any problems cropping up later on.

For example: if one team member works remotely, the others should know who will be communicating with them and when. If someone gets stuck or falls behind because their computer breaks down or their mobile doesn’t have enough credit, it’s crucial that everyone knows who they should ask for help so the whole thing doesn’t grind to a halt while they look for a solution.

Set realistic deadlines but don’t let anyone distract from them

If you set a realistic deadline for a task but someone else comes up with a work around which will make it easier, everyone should listen to the idea. However, they should then recalculate the deadlines in order that everyone can stick to them.

If someone gets distracted by their own ideas or by interesting information, it’s important that they’re honest about what they were doing when anyone is trying to contact them. Otherwise you risk wasting time chasing people up, or worse still wondering if you’ve been doing something wrong when they haven’t replied.

Share out work evenly

No one likes being accused of not pulling their weight so it’s vital that every team member knows what tasks are left to complete and how many there are compared to the others.