Agile Team Delivery

Focus on Flow and Work Completion

• Deliver work items that have the highest business values and identify and resolve bottlenecks and remove blockers.
• Focus on completion; a card doesn’t have value until that work is delivered. Which work on the board is closest to delivering value? Discuss this in your stand-up meetings.
• Use the board’s filtering function to help you filter the board by dates. This helps you see any cards on the board that are due to be delivered during a specific date range. Is there a lot of work sitting on the left side of the board? Those cards need to be considered for prioritization so they can meet their delivery date.
• Cards with the highest priority have a high business value. Use the board's Priorities filter to show those cards with a high or critical priority. From a flow perspective, what do you need to do to expedite those cards through the board so you can deliver that work as quickly as possible?
• Identify impaired work by using the board's Blockers filter. Once identified, your team can then have a conversation about those cards and decide on a plan to resolve and remove those blockers.
• Bottlenecks are a build-up of work within one of your process steps. You can visualize bottlenecks by implementing work in progress (WIP) limits to set the maximum amount of work that can exist in any given lane. WIP limits encourage us to finish work that's already in process before introducing more work into the system. When a WIP limit is reached, the affected lane turns red to show you where the work is backed up and you can then prioritize those cards so work can flow again.
• You can save frequently-used filters so you can quickly access them during stand-up meetings and other conversations about how the work is progressing.
• To easily focus on which work is being done by which resource, use a board’s filtering function to highlight cards assigned to a specific resource. This shows you not only which cards are assigned to that resource, but where each card sits within the delivery process.

             

  

              

Manage Work Flow by Implementing WIP Limits

• WIP stands for work in process or work in progress. By creating WIP limits on lanes in a kanban board, you can focus the team’s work on fewer work items and thus ensure a faster flow of business value being delivered to your customers. Stop starting work; start finishing it.
• Implementing WIP limits puts the emphasis on the work to be done, not the people doing the work. It is more important to keep work moving through your process flow than to keep people busy. The benefits of reducing work in progress include:
  • Increasing the speed at which business value can be delivered.
  • Delivering value faster creates shorter feedback loops between you and your customers.
  • It focuses the team’s attention on shared goals and encourages collaboration for solving blockers and other impediments to completing work.
  • It creates slack in the system to allow for improvements to your process by keeping the team from being so busy getting work done that they don’t have time to stop and think about where improvements can be made. This allows time for conducting retrospectives and supporting continuous improvement activities.
• When beginning to introduce teams to WIP limits on their boards, Planview recommends starting with a high limit that is just below the average amount of work that your teams are typically accustomed to managing. Over time, slowly reduce the limit. Use data that you generate through your boards to validate that this has the desired effect of increasing speed and predictability of value delivery.
• While WIP limits are helpful in controlling the amount of in-progress work at any given time, the limit doesn’t represent a rule that can never be broken. Sometimes unforeseen events happen and you may find you need to go over the limits you have established, which is OK as long as it doesn’t happen frequently and so long as the team and the stakeholders of the work are aware of the impact the decision will have on the team’s ability to deliver.

To learn more about implementing WIP limits in LeanKit, see Set Work-In-Process (WIP) Limits.

Identify and Resolve Blocked Work and Bottlenecks

• Work items (cards) that cannot currently proceed to the next process step (lane) on a board represent blocked work. In LeanKit, blocked cards—indicated by an X icon in the card's lower-right—show that a work item cannot currently proceed until it is unblocked. Because work items don’t have business value until you can deliver that work to your customers, it is important to resolve blocked cards as quickly as possible.

             

  

             

• From a Lean perspective, blocked work represents waste and therefore, a process-improvement opportunity. By applying a continuous improvement mindset, you can consider ways to improve your process to make issues such as blocked work less likely to happen in the future.

• Bottlenecks are often caused when you start work faster than you can finish work. Teams should work on resolving blocked cards as soon as possible—preferably before starting new work—thereby resolving potential bottlenecks in the workflow process.

• Creating lanes for on-hold or blocked work is discouraged because it removes the ability to identify where work might be getting stuck in your process. Rather than designing blocked work into your process, focus on understanding the underlying issues that are causing work to stagnate or be blocked. Use this understanding to improve your workflow process by encouraging teams to resolve blockers quickly and understand the root causes for those blockers to help prevent them in the future.

To learn more about blocked cards in LeanKit, see Understand Blocked Work.