Finally, a post on KanBan 🙂

I’ve been running teams who have been using KanBan for a few years. We find it is a really useful methodology to use, especially for our maintenance and dedicated testing/ release teams. Being a little lighter than Scrum, it enables us to quickly re-prioritise backlog items; ideal when you don’t know when the next Showstopper bug is going to come in.

Recently I’ve started to take things a little further with a pilot in my management team, which consists of test managers, defect managers and product owners who are driving various software projects to completion, mostly in the maintenance and productisation phases. The pilot involves using KanBan to run the team and prioritise the various actions and items that we need to drive forwards.

We wanted a lightweight approach to the toolset, so rather than go for a heavy tool, or something online (company policy – nothing on 3rd party servers), we picked SherePoint. Daniel Roots excellent guide on how to setup a KanBan board in SharePoint has been invaluable and what we have now certainly fits our need. OK, so you may not want to use this to run a detailed software project without some adaptation, but for prioritising and driving the management backlog then it works just fine, especially when tasks are sync’d with Outlook.

Changing our way-of-working was, as usual, initially difficult, but quickly the benefits of being able to see what everyone was working on and where it was in the cycle became apparent. Figuring out the work in progress limits for the team was a challenge, given the varied nature of the different roles, but we found that, more often than not, our tasks relied on each other, and therefore our ‘internal’ WIP limits did too. This meant that the team did have a natural velocity and this could be used to set WIP limits accordingly.

You may wonder whether this approach sounds a little heavy-handed? I’d argue that it does not, simply because you always keep an action list or backlog for a management team. Maybe you have tried to colour-code it or tabulate it, in order to make it more visible? You are halfway there. Why not go the full way and try KanBan for it instead?