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A Guide to
Agile Kanban
15 min read

2. Introduction

3. What is Kanban?

4. What is Kanban?
Kanban is a way for teams & organizations to visualize
their work. Every team member immediately gets
overview who’s doing what and can easily identify and
eliminate bottlenecks.
!
Kanban is about continuously improving your process and
the way you manage the flow of work, rather than
managing team members and their work.

5. What is Kanban?
Every member of the team and the team as a whole
benefits from Kanban. Teams reduce waste by setting the
optimal amount of work they can handle at one time
which leads to a smooth & continuous workflow.
!
Hence, you can automatically give greater focus to fewer
tasks and achieve higher product quality to eventually
provide greater value to the customer.

6. Why does Kanban work?

7. A picture is worth a thousand words — Kanban visualizes
your work by using cards on a Kanban board to create a
picture of your work.
!
The board makes work visible to the whole team by
showing how work is flowing through each step of the
process, and provides direct context for the work by
showing who is focusing on what & why.
Why does Kanban work?

8. Getting started

9. Get your Team on Board

10. Get your Team on Board
Kanban is built with you in mind whether your team is in
the same room, distributed over different floors, different
cities or even continents.
!
Invite marketing, sales, business development, customer
support and every other involved stakeholder to
collaborate directly with engineering, user experience &
design.
!
Bringing the skills of every individual together on the
same page gives the ability to move and ship faster.

11. Map your Workflow
See the status of the work being done at a glance by
visually representing each stage of your process flow in a
Kanban Board.
!
To create your workflow you first identify the major
processes of your department or organization and then
map them to a Kanban Board.

12. Map your Workflow
You can identify them by simply determining “Where do
features come from and where are they going next?”.
!
The initial stages of a workflow on a Kanban Board for
example could be:
!
User Experience > Implementation > Validation > Party
!
Add, update or remove stages to visualize your Workflow
to match your project’s needs.

13. Define Stage Policies
What happens in the stage
“Review”?

14. Define Stage Policies
Stage policies allow teams to explicitly define what
happens in every stage of their workflow.
!
They’re two fold. Stage policies set quality standards and
minimum requirements for cards to be in a specific
column.
!
Considerations or requirements that should be met at a
certain stage of the process can be defined as well in a
stage’s policy.

15. Visualize Work

16. Visualize Work
Map your entire software development workflow in
Kanban Boards to get overview about who is working on
what and most importantly why.
!
Start by adding Cards that represent features which are
worth doing.
!
Cards should have a short title that everyone in your
team can recognize and understand.

17. Visualize Work
Ideally each card should show the reason why it is being
built, who is currently involved and an optional state, for
example if it is "Blocked" or "Ready for the next Stage”.
!
By doing this work gets visible to all involved
stakeholders, collaboration and communication increases
instantly and you are able to easily identify blockers,
bottlenecks and things that slow the delivery to the
customer down.

18. Limit Work-in-Progress
Reduce the time a card takes to go through from the first
to the last stage by adding card limits to stages of the
board in which work is being performed.
!
Setting the optimal amount of work that your team can
handle at one time will lead to a smooth & continuous
workflow and it improves quality because you can give
greater focus to fewer tasks.
!
These benefits improve efficiency and you eventually get
more work done in less time.

19. “Pulling” new Work
In a push system finished work gets “pushed” to the next
step in the workflow. Whereas in a pull system — like
Kanban — work gets “pulled” from one stage to the next
when there are open slots available.
!
So when a team member is ready to start to work on
something new, he or she pulls a new card into the
appropriate stage on the board.
!
Pulling work leads to flowing work smoothly through the
board and leads to higher quality products.

20. Measure & Learn
Where can we improve?
What was the blocker here?
What made this ship so fast?

21. Measure & Learn
Managing your work with a Kanban Board shows how
work is flowing through your development process.
!
Measure and analyze the performance of your flow with
tools like the Cycle Time of Cards, via mapping your
workflow on a Time in Process Chart, creating a table of
Outlying Cards and the Cumulative Flow Diagram.
!
These metrics help you to prevent future problems and
provide you the information you need to optimize your
current flow and maximize efficiency.

22. Best Practices and
Work Examples

23. Handling the Backlog

24. Handling the Backlog
In a fast moving company priorities can change daily,
hourly or even every minute. Pulling new work from a
different source than the first stage of your main process
Kanban board implies to remind you to prioritize work
again every time you pull new work to your Kanban
board. You can pick out the most valuable work that
needs to get done next.
!
Work that has been predefined could lead you in the
wrong direction if the market situation changed in the
meantime.

25. Handling the Backlog
Two recommendations to prevent cards piling up in the
Kanban Board where you visualize your main process.
!
Use a Separate Board
Collect the "ideas" or "cards to be implemented" on a
separate board and create a new card in your project as
soon as the idea ready to be implemented.

26. Handling the Backlog
Or use a High-Level Roadmap
Create a high-level roadmap in free text format where
you derive concrete cards out of your higher level goals
and eventually add them to your Kanban board.
!
Recommended Method: Objectives & Key Results

27. Defining Work

28. Defining Work
The team should define a way how work gets on a board.
!
Either choose a idea/feature to implement depending on
what’s important and valuable for the customer.
!
Or a board owner defines the work.

29. Defining Stage Policies
Go through every stage policy together with each
involved team member and make sure she understands
the policies well.
!
The more context there is the better the focus and quality
of the work outcome will be.

30. Defining Stage Policies
The easiest way to start is with the text “Features in this
stage…”
!
Examples include:
!
• Have a UX concept.
• Have been developed and tested.
• Have been distributed across our traction channels.

31. Defining Stage Policies
After you’ve described the policy, follow up with some
tips/quality descriptions.
!
For example:
!
• Set a due date in the company calendar to follow up on
feature’s performance.
• Review work among team before deploying.
• Closely monitor WIP limit in this stage.

32. Stand-up Meetings
A powerful way to drive improvement and to get a better
feeling for the performance of the flow are regularly held
standup meetings.
!
“Standups” received their name because teams meet and
gather around the board while standing.

33. Stand-up Meetings
To emphasize the pull system you “walk” the stages of the
board from right to left.
!
Observe while going through the board:
!
Do the cards flow through the board smoothly?
Are there any blockers?
!
The “Standup” is a powerful tool for open collaboration
and transparency in teams.

34. Work Time Estimations
Getting estimations right is hard.
!
In Kanban you don’t measure how much you can do
within a certain period of time. You measure how long a
story needs from idea to roll out.
!
Priorities are defined depending on what’s important and
valuable for the customers, or in any aspect of the
company.

35. Work Time Estimations
With every work iteration you get a better feeling on how
long work takes based on evidence rather than
estimation.
You are able to optimize your flow and maximize
efficiency.

36. Kanban enables Continuous Delivery
CustomersDevelopment Continuous Delivery
Design
Marketing
Engineering
Sales
Support

37. Kanban enables Continuous Delivery
Markets can change fast and therefore companies need
to be able to act quickly to stay upfront.
!
Since Kanban doesn’t use time-boxed iterations you can
deliver continuously.
!
Every story leads to a working feature and ideally to a
release.

38. Mark Work as ready
If a feature you are working on is finished and ready to
advance to the next stage you can mark the card as ready
to let everyone know.
!
A team member with an open working slot can pull the
card into the next stage of the process.

39. When Work is blocked
Let’s assume a feature you are working on is blocked for
some reason.
!
Example: the API of a service you are integrating with
doesn’t work as described.
!
Make the blocker visible to the whole team by marking
the card as blocked. Also add the reason (in form of text
for example) why it’s blocked or on which action you are
waiting so your team can solve the blocker as soon as
possible.
!

40. Thank you for reading!
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Agile for Software Teams