Introducing Kanban (part 2)
(This post is a continuation. Please read part 1 first.)
In my last post I briefly discussed the “kanban-lite” system that I had been using over the past year or so. I adopted this system for several reasons:
- As a team working on multiple projects, there were often multiple stakeholders with different goals who wanted some of my team’s time
Each of these stakeholders had valid reasons for their selections of issues that we should tackle. By getting together and having a weekly meeting to see what was really pressing, I could ensure that I was working towards what was best for the company, not just trying to placate whoever was yelling the loudest. In lean terms, this is known as “seeing the whole”.
- My team was known as the “Fast Track” team, since our primary mandate was to respond rapidly to customer reported defects and small features that could close deals
Project teams at Sophos often undertake projects that are anywhere between 3 and 24 months in length. My releases are more on the order of two weeks. Since I’m releasing software so frequently, I wanted a system that encouraged flow and ensured that we were still delivering high-quality releases. Having a visible board where each item’s state was clearly displayed made it very obvious when we should finish and polish in-progress stories instead of starting new items.
- I’d been reading quite a bit about Lean Software Development, which encourages flow and the elimination of waste (another term for non-value added activities)
A key technique of Lean is value stream mapping – identifying where and when value is added to your product, and pointing out areas that can be removed since they don’t add value. The visual card board is an easy way to show at least part of the value stream (the value stream really begins when a customer files a defect or a product manager thinks of a new feature), and I had thought about (but not gotten around to) recording the amount of time issues spend in the various states.
So, you may ask, why would I switch to Kanban if my system was already working? I’ll discuss that in the next post.
