WIXLIB

3. The Scope of your Board – Horizontal and VerticalNow that you know what kind of a Kanban board toset up, where do you start? What is the problem youare trying to solve?Before you start with your Kanban board design, it isa good idea to start with that question. Why are youimplementing Kanban? Is it the challenge of notbeing able to complete all stories in a sprint? Is it theinability to meet your timeline estimates for yourwork? Is it poor quality of your product or service?Exactly what part of your overall work are you facingthe problem(s) in?But I don’t have a problem!It is very likely you might believe you don’t have aproblem. Someone – your boss – asked you to take alook at Kanban! But everything is working well.Quality is good. Delivery happens on time.Commitments are kept. Customers are happy. Whyfix something that ain’t broke, you ask?Good point! The thing to ask might be, is it possibleyou can still improve and expand your business?Reduce time to market? Win or convert opportunities Digité, Inc.that you were not even able to look at earlier? Allthese are good reasons to consider using Kanban –and to design that board accordingly.The common questions you are trying to respond toare – Where do we start? And end? How much of ourworkflow should we put on the board? Whatabout the work that happens prior to our workingon it? What is our current workflow?Additionally, your work might depend on some“upstream” function that might further affect howyou design your Kanban board. You need to decidewhere you want to “start” your Kanban board andwhere you want to end it.You can start by considering – what is the context inwhich you work? Context can be a function ofmultiple factors – The specific Function/ Product/ Service(s) youwork for Upstream and Downstream Dependencies onother functions10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 9

Your Specific Function/ Deliverable/ ServiceAs a team, what is your main responsibility? Whatare your key deliverables for your (internal orexternal) customers?The simple answer to the question of scope is ofcourse to look at work that comes into your team’s“in-tray” or inbox. The workflow is complete whenyour team finishes working on it and it gets handedoff either to a customer or to another team thatmight need to work on it further. This keeps theboard design simple and helps you focus on yourworkflow or your process and helps you analyze yourperformance. Digité, Inc.Dependencies on Upstream/ Downstream ActivityIt may not be important to model the workflow foryour entire context, but it is important to understandit. Even if you want to focus on your own team’swork, you will still benefit from an understanding ofwhat happens to the work prior to its arrival at yourKanban board. Similarly, you will want to understandhow that work is handled by your customer (do theyhave to do a formal approval or a sign off) or by thenext team in line (how they work on it and deliver itto the next stage).Gaining an understanding of both upstream anddownstream workflows is central to the concept of“systems-thinking” – and to ensuring that at anoverall level, your organization is looking to optimizethe entire workflow, the entire system, not just localworkflows at individual team level. This is crucialsince focusing only at a few (or your own) workflowsand optimizing them could lead to imbalances in bothupstream and downstream parts of the organization– the concept of system optimization vs. localoptimization.10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 10

While it is not possible to discuss this aspect in detailin this paper, we definitely recommend taking a lookat immediately upstream and downstream functions,their activity and the impact your own optimizationefforts might have on them.This also helps you decide if you have a single levelworkflow – or if some stages might need to beexploded (decomposed) into “lower-level” detailedworkflows. Doing so enables you to keep a simpler,yet detailed enough, workflow at the top level andprovide greater visibility to more detailed steps thatonly some parts of your top-level workflow mighthave.having their own swim-lanes. For example, on aMarketing board, working on a website page andworking on an event such as a webinar might bothcome under a “In-Progress” column at the higherlevel, but the event organization is a complex/detailed task – and could benefit from having aseparate “Events” swim-lane that has all thenecessary steps for it to be managed and trackedeffectively.You can easily model this using multiple swim laneswithin the same board, with lower level workflows Digité, Inc.10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 11

4. The Work Mix you will manage on the BoardMost managers, when planning their team’s work, ormaking commitments on their behalf to theirmanagement, do not realize that most of the time,their teams are doing multiple type of work. In thecase of software teams, for example, that work maycomprise of new features, enhancement to existingfeatures as well as defect fixes. It might also need toinclude some code refactoring work for the overallhealth of the product/ application.Questions to ask while designing your Board – What work do we do? Are there different types ofwork items and deliverables? Does each of them have the same workflow ordifferent workflows? What volume of each type of work do we get eachday or week or month? How much are we able todeliver?In the case of a marketing team, the work mightinclude short tasks - such as social media posts on adaily basis as well as longer lead-time activities suchas organizing a conference or a webinar. Of course, Digité, Inc.you could also be responding to broken website linksand fixing other issues on the website.Whether you are a software/ IT team, or you are amarketing, HR, legal or Support team, you have somekey responsibilities and specific deliverables based onthat activity. These include your main deliverablesbut also some that would be considered intangible(“important but not urgent”) category. In software,code refactoring come to mind.The best way to look at your work is by the type ofwork it is – and classify it as such. In the case of asoftware team, these might be User Stories,Enhancements and Defects, for example. In the caseof a Maintenance team or an IT Helpdesk team, thesemight be Support Tickets, Service Requests, Issues,Defects, etc. In the case of a marketing team, thesemight be mailers, social media updates, SEO tasks,blog posts, and so on.The reason to do this “demand” analysis (work thatyour team is being asked to do represents demandon your team’s capacity) is to understand the workmix – and the variability in your work mix.10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 12

separate them into different swim-lanes that havethe workflow needed for each group. For example,User Stories and Enhancements workflow may bedifferent from the workflow for Issues and Defects.The easiest thing to do initially would be to start witha common workflow/ swim lane for all type of work.Based on the work items, you might decide to have aKanban board where each work item might have itsown separate workflow (and so a swim lane).Or you might choose to keep them all in a single lanebecause by and large their workflow is similar.Ability to Observe, Manage and ImproveFlowThis is probably one of the most powerful aspects ofvisualization on a Kanban board. Kanban is aboutimplementing Pull, managing and improving Flow.In order to be able to observe flow, you need yourboard to be ‘active’ where every so often – perhapsevery day, every few hours or days – work movesfrom one stage to the next and your team gets thevisceral satisfaction of accomplishing somethingevery so often!Later, if it turns out that the workflow for some itemsis very different from that of others, you could Digité, Inc.All people associated with the board should be ableto relate to card movement with work progress andbe able to observe it on a regular basis. That means,10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 13

ideally, you should not have cards on your board thatsit in one place for weeks on end while a lot of workis actually getting done on that card.Of course, this applies primarily to team level boards.If you are looking at portfolio level boards, it is quitelikely you will have cards that represent projects orlarge initiatives, which might sit under an “Execution”or “In-progress” stage for long periods of time. (Infact, we have solved that problem with a special“Portfolio Lane” capability that helps you track %progress completion with automatic card movementfor such high level cards in your portfolio Kanbanboards!)The next 3 factors are crucial for being able toobserve, manage and measure Flow!5. Granularity of WorkflowAs mentioned earlier, it is not enough to have a “ToDo – Doing – Done” workflow with potential longlead-time “Doing” stage where work might ‘sit’ fordays or weeks. Nor does it lend itself to anyworkflow analysis of which stage of the valueaddition might be problematic – prone to delays orbeing blocked for example. By breaking the “Doing” Digité, Inc.stage into a sufficient number of actual value-addingsteps, you can better understand the nature of thework – and better observe flow of work across thosesteps.There are a few interesting and important aspectsabout defining an effective workflow – these aredescribed below.Handoff between people vs. between process stepsHow detailed should the workflow breakdown be? Ifthe work is being done by the same person, shouldyou have a “large” single step – say Development (inthe context of software development work) or shouldyou break it down to say “Design – Coding JUnits –Functional Automation”? What if the same person isdoing all 3 steps – would your answer vary based onthat?As they say, follow the work, not the people. In aKanban board (or any workflow analysis for thatmatter), what you are trying to understand is whatstages of work are more impactful from say lead-timeperformance perspective, what stages are thebottlenecks, what stages are more complex, etc. Soeven if the same person is working on multiple10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 14

contiguous stages of an overall step, it would beuseful to identify and define them on your Kanbanboard.workflow, and impact the overall efficiency of thesystem significantly. (This is referred to as FlowEfficiency – more on that at the end of the paper). Soyou definitely should model the handoffs, mappingboth the work stages as well as the intermediate waitstage.Intermediate Buffer QueuesA handoff from one person to another typicallyrepresents a switch between process steps, so youdefinitely want to map those handoffs (unless it is ahandoff between two people in 2 consecutive shiftsin a 24x7 support environment, where the nextperson continues to do the exact same thing theprevious person was!)The other aspect of a handoff is the delay that usuallyoccurs between work being completed on a workitem in one stage and the start of work on that itemin the next stage. Handoffs typically result in asignificant amount of wait time in an overall Digité, Inc.A word about the intermediate wait stages. Waitstages are important as they work as buffersbetween 2 work stages, each of which might havedifferent capacities and throughput or speed ofdelivery. The wait states help in evening out minor –or temporary - differences in capacity of successivework stages.If one working stage delivers work directly into itssuccessor working stage, it can quickly result in a“jamming of capacity” of the next working stage.Having the intermediate buffer state helps thepeople in the next stage continue to focus on theircurrent work, and only pull work from the previousstage when they are ready for it – that is, havecapacity to do it.10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 15

Seeing the work items in the wait state serves as areminder to them, as also to the overall system, ofany buildup of work in progress (WIP) and alertsthem to potential slowdown in overall throughput orvelocity of the work being done.Most importantly, intermediate buffer states helpteams and managers measure more accuratelywhere the delay in the system is occurring. If Dev hascompleted their work – and it is now waiting in the“ready for test” state, the delay is on the testingstage, perhaps indicating there may not be enoughtesters in the system and highlighting the issue moreclearly.In order to save horizontal space while designing theKanban board, it is desirable to have just 1intermediate wait stage. In general, it is a good ideato name that Dev Done instead of Ready for Test.Dev Done indicates that Dev is done with that work.However, the Testing team may not be ready forstarting work on it. Only when they are, they pullwork into the Testing In-progress column.Consecutive Buffer StagesShould you have both a “Dev Done” and a “Ready forTest” buffer states? Couldn’t we just have one,perhaps the “Ready for Test”, as shown below – Digité, Inc.However, we have seen some rare situations wherethere is a contention between Dev and Test (orsimilar other functions) whether Dev is reallycomplete or not! In high-cost or critical situations,management might really need to pinpoint the rootcause of delays in the system – and might want tohave both states. Hopefully, you do not have toworry about this and can manage with just one“Done” intermediate buffer!10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 16

6. Granularity of Work ItemsJust as important as the workflow steps is the workbreakdown. Even if you have finer workflow steps,but have large chunks of work, they will exhibit asimilar tendency of not moving across steps becauselarge pieces of work take longer to complete. So,especially at the level where you want to specificallymeasure detailed metrics such as flow efficiency,cycle time and throughput, you should ensure thatthe work breakdown is sufficient to provide the‘flow’. At the same time, you need to ensure not tomake it too granular so you are burdened withmanaging hundreds of cards on the Kanban board!You need to balance between too much and too littlegranularity of work. You might consider an explicitpolicy for your board that makes it clear to all teammembers what goes on the board as a card, and whatdoes not. For example, you might say anything thattake 15 minutes or less need not go as a separatecard – perhaps you track all your small tasks in a daywith a single card that accumulates all such effort forthe day. Digité, Inc.In addition to the above, there are a couple of otherinteresting and important aspects of how you defineworkflow on the board.Hierarchy of Work ItemsOne aspect of this factor is that most work we do is“hierarchical” in nature. Smaller pieces of work addup to higher-level tasks and projects and corporateobjectives.Even at a team level, you can easily have a hierarchyin which you naturally think of and plan work. Thiscould be, in the context of Agile teams, an Epic – UserStory – Task hierarchy. It could be a Program –Project – Task hierarchy for a PMO team. Eachbusiness context will have its own example.Depending on how you go about it, you might wantto model all levels of a hierarchy in your Kanbanboard – with different swim lanes to track each levelof the hierarchy, or you might track each level on aseparate Kanban board. You could show parent-childlinks using stickies on a physical board or linksavailable in a tool like SwiftKanban.10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 17

7. Reduced Multitasking: Limiting WIPLimiting the work in progress (WIP) and reducingmultitasking in order to help your team membersfinish what they are currently working on beforepulling new work is one of the cornerstones of theKanban method!Some common questions most teams defining WIPLimits for the first time have are –As you can imagine, the lower level child cards willmove “faster” than higher-level parent cards. At thesame time, the workflow will be more granular forlower level cards, less so at the parent levels. So,cards on different levels or boards will exhibitdifferent but expected behavior.Based on what your team feels is the ideal way toshow or measure progress, you will need to decidehow different components of your work-itemhierarchy will need to be modeled in one or moreKanban boards. Digité, Inc. How do WIP Limits work? How does reducing WIP actual improve Flow? How do we define WIP Limits?As has been said often, WIP limits work as theconstraints or the channel through which work flows.They prevent you from pulling new work in to thechannel - and force you to first finish what you arealready doing. They force you to address any blocked10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 18

items sitting in the channel and ‘occupying capacity’.The more you complete current work and pass italong to the next stage, the more you help work tokeep flowing through your Kanban board. Voila! Youhave Flow!1.5) times the number of people working in thatqueue.(At the Lean Kanban India Conference in 2016, DonReinertsen gave a very simple formula for definingthe WIP Limits. He said not to define WIP limits at thestart. Simply observe your board and the workflow.Once you had established what the average WIP wasin each column, you could start by defining the WIPlimit equal to twice the average WIP. After that,you’d adjust based on system behavior.)Defining the WIP Limits is very empowering! Theyhelp you understand your team’s limits on how muchwork they can take on. More importantly, they serveas a constant reminder to your customers ormanagers that your team has limited capacity!Having the WIP limits visualized has a dramaticdampening effect on people trying to push additionalwork at the team (for genuine reasons)!Defining the WIP Limits for your board is can feeltricky in the beginning. What value do you assign tothe WIP Limit on each column?A simple but effective formula is to have the WIPLimit for a column or queue to be equal to 1-2 (or Digité, Inc.They help you truly push your stakeholders and teammembers to focus on the most important things to beachieved – and select only those for working on next.WIP Limits make sure that you don’t getoverwhelmed with “Urgent” stuff all the time; and ifneeded, they help you have conversations around10 Factors for Kanban Board DesignPage 19

what needs to get off the board

Kanban helps you visualize and improve a variety of processes. Using a Kanban board, you can observe work flowing across the workflow, and over time, improve the process as well as make effective predictions about your delivery capability. Digité, Inc. 10 Factors for Kanban Board Design P