I often say that you can implement Kanban in your team in a single afternoon. That’s how we did that after all. So when Andy Brandt asked me to do Kanban Basics webinar I expected that preparing it would be pretty simple. How long can you talk about few-hour-long task?
Well, it wasn’t as simple as I expected.
Kanban itself is very simple. But telling people they should visualize workflow, limit work in progress and measure the flow isn’t really all the basic stuff they need to know. After a while it always ends up with questions how we do this and how we do that.
What limits should be set on board?
What happens when a bug is found during testing?
Should sticky notes be moved back on the board at all?
How cycle time is measured?
What happens when the limit is reached?
What to do when emergency task pops up?
How to cope with multiple projects?
Is feature-by-feature deployment mandatory?
How estimation is done?
That’s an interesting observation – I often deal with most of these questions at the end of my Kanban presentations, no matter if I cover basic or advanced material. After giving it some thought I decided this would be a good starting point to prepare Kanban Basics presentation.
What I ended up is presentation below. It covers a bunch of scenarios visualized with (surprise, surprise) Kanban board. Additionally I used Scrum as the reference to make a basic Kanban description easier to understand.
If you have some basic questions which seem to be omitted in the presentation, please leave a comment. I’d be happy to both answer the questions and update future versions of the presentation.
If you speak Polish feel free to watch the recording of the webinar.
Also, check The Kanban Story series as it reveals all the details of Kanban implementation in my current team.
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