kanban

This week we received our upstream whiteboard, also referred to as our Product Owner Kanban board. Here is a list of reasons why we decided to go with Product Owner Kanban board:

1. Needed to provide development with a view of what was coming
2. Needed to ensure that the Product Owner was completing certain activities before development started working on a feature (“Making work Ready”)
3. Noticed that some features were too big to work on prior to giving them to development (Breaking work down)
4. Didn’t have a standard way of handing work off
5. Wanted to prevent piling work onto development
6. Product Owner felt left out without his on board J

Almost all of these reasons were identified when the development team made their work visible and when we noticed that work was getting bottlenecked in testing.

Later this week I’ll post some status reports that I have created for stakeholders that show progress.

Here is our some of the pictures of our new Product Owner Kanban board as well as a link to some slides I created.

Always open to suggestions if you have any.

http://www.slideshare.net/choldorf/kanban-product-owner-board-4154065

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This last week had its highlights and challenges. I’d thought I’d go ahead and share what those moments were. Here were the highlights:

• Documented what we thought our WIP’s were for each column. This is really tuff because more than half of our team is offsite. But I will figure out a way to fix this.
• Prioritized and aligned our work with resources. This helped us make sure the most important things had the right number of people on it.
• Started discussing where our bottleneck were.

Challenges:

• We missed a critical milestone by 2 days that caused concern in our stakeholders and teams performance. This really makes me mad because the team is doing great, but this little miss creates big problems for me.
• Having a hard time pulling metrics from our system (Jira/Greenhopper). Today it took me an hour to pull a cumulative flow diagram. Very disappointing.
• Cards kept moving from done to testing because defects were found. Right now we only have 5-10% code coverage so things are really fragile.

The one thing that got me super pumped was the customer team is going to start an upstream kanban board because they see the value the downstream board has created. The board should be up by this week. Be prepared to see pictures of that.

Overall, the board has been great and there has been great conversations started and problems fixed.

[slideshow]

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I continue to change things to make it feel better for the team and myself. This week I have added a few things to help:

1)      Bug avatars – I added bugs to cards that have open defects. So now you can look a card and visually see how many open defects there are.

2)      Policies – I also started adding “policies” to column. These are kind of like checklist to make sure we are doing the correct things prior to moving it to the next column.

3)      Road Blocks – I also made it visible if a card is blocked by something. You can see a big “roadblock” sticker. This helps to quickly identify what is preventing a card from moving forward.

4)      Snake on the Wall – I also started to make it visible if people are working on something other than the cards, this way we can reflect if we need to make a change in the department to address something. http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/12/snake-on-the-wall

Some of the things that we are struggling with now are:

• WIP – I really need to crack down on how much work can be started at once. We didn’t have anything for testing to test so they just started testing all kinds of weird combinations that created a bunch of defects.
• Done vs. Done/Done – There are some features that work and work fine, but since there are open defects, the Product Owner team thinks they are not done. I’d argue and say that it is working as expected, and we are chasing the 20% perfection that could go on forever. At some point you have to move on.
• Metrics – Need to start keeping track of how long cards stay in a column. It is kind of tuff right now because most cards are in progress or testing because we are just finishing up a project. However, I think I should just start or I will continue to make excuses on not tracking it.

Overall the board is working great to make things visible and drive the right behaviors.

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That last 3 days have been very productive. Here is what we have created:

• Created avatars for each person so it was easy to see what people are working on. (One small problem is that we have half of our scrum team in India, so I will have to tackle the problem soon)
• Created some classes of services. The color of the cards represent the class of service
• Created the value stream columns
• Had our first “walk the wall” daily standup

Had lots of questions about:

• What the “rules” are for moving cards from one state to the other.
• Had questions about how many cards could be in each state
• How many cards can one person be working on
• If something is moved to done and then a defect is detected later, does the card get moved back

Here what we have settled on for our columns (working backwards):

• Production
• Done – Not in Production
• Testing / Defect Fixing
• Ready for Test
• Development
• Analysis / Design / Requirements
• Ready for Development
• Stories Created
• Themes (class of services)
• Backlog

So next week I will work with the team to identify policies for moving cards and creating WIP limits.

In general, it feels like we have too many things in progress and not getting things moved to done.

However, it is still better then what we were doing before.

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Today was not very productive. Had all kinds of other meetings plus a doctors appointment. I did however make some lines on the baord which already created plenty of dicussions. Both testing and development were excited about the board and willing to give it a try. They all agreed that our electronic board “hides” data and does not give a good view.

Tomorrow I only have one meeting and hope to make a major dent.

I think I am going to start with what @markotaipale recommended.
http://huitale.blogspot.com/2010/03/huitale-way-our-value-stream-map.html

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Here is our new white board where my Kanban board will go. I stopped at Office Depot and picked up all kinds of stickers and dots to help with making work visible.
My thoughts on columns are:
1) Done – Not in Production
2) Testing
3) Ready for Testing
4) Development
5) Ready for Development
6) Backlog

I am sure it will change, but I thought we could start with this. Let me know if you have other tricks or thoughts.

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