Getting Started with Kanban

It finally happened! We got some pizzas and my team in a room with a clean whiteboard and got to work. I followed the model laid out in Kanban in Action and had them first write down the things they're working on - that took five minutes and generated a staggering number of stickies (some of the team took it to mean "what kind of tasks do you do" rather than specific examples of work items, but I think it's still useful to see the breadth of their work). Then we started walking through the workflow. This varied a lot depending on the team member. Everyone got time at the whiteboard.

Once we had gone around the room and agreed that those were the steps, I encouraged them to start turning that brain dump into a flow. We got partway into that exercise before people had to leave for another commitment. Everyone remained engaged through the exercise, and has at least tentatively committed to continuing. I think I did okay with guiding the discussion and letting them figure out what their board was going to look like. My manager asked me what kind of commitment of my time will be necessary (consultant-speak, the length of the engagement), which I estimated at three more weeks -- keeping mind that the past three weeks has mostly been spent observing and waiting for an opportunity to meet with the group.

I think that we can iron out a decent starting iteration of their board fairly quickly from what we have. A bigger challenge is going to be nailing down the policies that govern the flow. As I tried to explain it, there's an iceberg of invisible work going on here, and needs to be make visible before anything can be done to address it. So my plan right now is to try to work with the team on the board columns during this week, building them out as we go through the daily standup and seeing how they work in real life. If we can do that, the next time we get a big chunk of time we can talk about how they want to represent the work itself on the board, and maybe get into WIP limits. Probably need a third session on categories of work, since they regularly deal with emergencies.

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