We implemented Kanban a few months ago to manage our maintenance and support work on our SAP BW system. This blog explains how we implemented and use Kanban.
Kanban is a lean approach to agile software development. The approach is the following (from http://www.crisp.se/kanban😞
For a quick introduction to Kanban and its benefits, see http://www.crisp.se/kanban. For an example of a complex project (60+ persons), see Lean from the Trenches - An example of Kanban in a large software project at http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/Lean-from-the-trenches.pdf. If you want a comparison between Scrum and Kanban, see http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/Kanban-vs-Scrum.pdf.
Here is our Kanban board. We use it to manage maintenance and support work. Today, the board is only used by two developers. We will expand its use gradually to the rest of the team at some later stage.
The board is not filled to its maximum capacity because we just released a whole bunch of stories to Production and we're about to pull work from the backlog.
When we received a new request, we add a Post-It in the Created column (no WIP limit). A request could be a feature or a simple story (as in Scrum). Requests come from the business or from the team itself (i.e. internal work). If there is fixed delivery date, we write it on the Post-It.
If a feature/story is accepted, we move it to the Accepted column (no WIP limit). This is where features are broken down into stories. We try to break down stories so that it takes less than 5 man-days of development to complete them.
We then have a pull mechanism to fill in the Planned column. When the number of stories falls below a predefined level in this column, we start to replenish the column until we reach the WIP limit. This is easily achieved as we have a daily stand-up meeting in front of the board with the team. Obviously, we need to groom the backlog (Created and Accepted columns) in order to have stories ready.
Stories then move through the Development, Tests, Deployment and Done stages. We have WIP limit on all of those except Deployment.
If a story is blocked, we add a pink Post-It next to it with a brief description.
If needed, we add additional Post-Its next to a story with tasks (this is very rare and happens usually in development when more than one person needs to work on a story).
If defects are found during testing, we add a pink Post-It next to the story with a brief description of the defect.
DoD is described above each column. This is very important to ensure quality. For example, the DoD for Accepted is:
We also have a swimlane (at the bottom) for support work (no WIP limit).
Kanban is very easy to put in place because you start from your existing process and you gradually improve it. First, we identified all the steps in our workflow (e.g. Analysis, Development, Test, Deployment and Done). We then added all our work in progress on the Kanban board.
We immediately visualised the bottlenecks and took actions to keep things moving (that's the beauty of limiting WIP). We then talked about retrospective (to optimise the process) and decided to have it every month (we actually improve the process on a daily basis but taking one hour every month is good to have a "higher" perspective).
We had discussion about the way we release to Production and decided to keep things the way they were i.e. release to Production as soon as ready (except during critical period e.g. monthly financial closing).
Finally, we met our internal clients to see how they wanted to plan work i.e. define priorities and schedule work. Basically, they were happy about the way we handled priorities. We thought about having a weekly or bi-weekly meeting but they rejected the idea. The pull mechanism we put in place (i.e. fill in the Planned column when the number of stories falls below a predefined level) seems to work well so far.
Here are the main benefits:
Kanban by David J. Anderson
Afterword
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