Insights from a Kanban Board

I was working with a team this week, part of which involved reviewing their kanban board and discussing how it was evolving and what they were learning. There was one aspect in particular which generated a number of insights, and is a good example of how visualising work can help make discoveries that you might not otherwise unearth.

The board had a “On Hold” section, where post-its were collected for work on which some time had been spent, but which was not actively being progressed or had any expectation to be progressed, and which wasn’t blocked in any way. Quite a lot of work had built up in “On Hold”, which made it an obvious talking point, so we explored what that work was, and why it was there. These are the things we learnt:

1. Some of the work wasn’t really “On Hold”, but were really requests which had been “Assessed” (the first stage in the workflow) and deemed valid and important, but not urgent enough to schedule imminently. This led to a discussion about commitment points, and a better understanding of what the backlog and scheduling policies were. In this case, items were not really “On Hold”, but had been put back on the backlog. In addition, a cadence of cleaning the backlog was created to remove requests that were no longer valid or important.
2. Some of the work was “On Hold” because while it was valid and important, the urgency was unknown. It was an “Intangible” class of service. As a result it was always de-prioritised in favour of work where the urgency was clearer. For example work to mitigate a security risk wasn’t going to be urgent enough until the risk turned into a genuine issue which needed resolving. To avoid these items building up, and generating even greater risk, a “Donkey Derby” lane was created as a converse of their “Fast Track” lane. Work in this lane would progress more slowly, but at least there would always be at least one “Intangible” items in process.
3. A very few items were genuinely “On-Hold”, but they were lost amidst the noise of all the other tokens. Thus any discussion about what to do, or what could be learned, was being lost.

In summary, by visualising the “On Hold” work (however imperfect it was), and creating a shared understanding, the team were able to improve their knowledge creation workflow, better manage their risk and increase their ability to learn from their work.