Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Category: kanban

  • The Kanban Story: Initial Methodology

    You already know how our team looked like and what concerns I had with implementing plain old Scrum. You also know we chose “take this from here and take that from there” kind of approach to running our projects. Our base method was Scrum but we were far, far away from accepting it the orthodox way.

    What we finally agreed on within the team can be described in several rules:

    1. Planning
    For each application at the beginning we were deciding what we want to see there in the next version. We were trying to limit a number of features but didn’t set any limits how long development should take. The longest cycle was something between three and four weeks.

    2. Requirements
    When we’d known what we wanted to do we were creating user stories and non-functional requirements. Each session took whole team, even when someone wasn’t going to develop that specific application. As it usually happens the scope was being changed as we discussed different aspects of planned work. We were adding (more often) or cutting off (less often) features. We were building a coarse-grained architecture as we discussed non-functional requirements. At the end of the day we had a whiteboard full of stories which were a starting point for development.

    3. Tasks
    Since user stories were rather big we were splitting them to smaller pieces – development tasks. This was changing view from feature-wise to code-wise. Development tasks were intended as small pieces of work (possibly not bigger than 16-hour long) which were a complete wholes from a developer’s point of view. Ideally a single user story should have several tasks connected to it and single development task should be connected with only one user story or non-functional requirement. It wasn’t a strict rule however and sometimes we had many-to-many relation since specific changes in architecture (single development task) were affecting many usage scenarios (many user stories). Development tasks should make as much sense as possible for developers so they were defined by developers themselves and by those who were going to do the job. Tasks were stored in a system which was used company-wide.

    4. Estimation
    At the very beginning we had no strict deadlines but we were estimating anyway. There were two goals: learn to estimate better when there aren’t huge consequences for being wrong and getting into a habit of estimating all of planned work. Our estimates were done against developer tasks, not user stories. The main reason why we went this way was that tasks were smaller so estimates naturally were better than they would be if we did them against user stories. A specific, pretty non-agile, thing we were doing with estimation was a rule of estimating each task by a developer who would be doing it. More on this in one of future posts.

    5. Measuring progress and work done
    Current progress could be verified by checking actual state of tasks connected with a specific app. Nothing fancy here. The thing which was important here was writing down how much time it took to complete the task. When completed each task had two values – estimated time needed to complete the task and time it really took to do it. At the end of the day we knew how much our estimates were flawed. The important thing here was official announcement that no one is going to be punished in any way for poor estimates.

    That was pretty much all. No stand-ups since we were all sitting in one room and we discussed issues and work progress whenever someone felt like it. No Scrum Master since, well, we weren’t doing sprints and within specific project things were rather self-organized. A kind of Product Owner emerged, impersonated by me, as we needed a connector between constantly changing business environment and the team working on different projects. You could say we needed one to bring some chaos to our work which would be equally true.

    We were going to build a few small projects that way. At the same time we were prepared to improve the way we create our software as soon as notice flaws and find a way to fix them.

    Keep an eye on the whole Kanban Story.

  • The Kanban Story: The Beginning

    So I found myself in this small team, part of a bigger company but working pretty independent of the rest of people here. Kind of start-upish environment. I knew every single person I worked with. Well, actually I’d chosen most of them and hired them here. The team was great (if you guys are reading this: no, it is not a reason to come for a raise) and personally I didn’t feel an urge to strictly control everything. On the other hand some order is always a nice thing.

    Initially I gave a lot of thought to project management practices and didn’t come with a solution I was happy with.

    I rejected PMP-based heavy-weight process which works for many projects in the organization. We didn’t need all the hassle they bring. At least not at that stage. A natural idea was Scrum which I didn’t like either. Scrum is pretty formalized methodology too and I wanted to avoid formalisms as much as possible. Actually with a lot of R&D work, pretty much prototyping and priorities changing all the time I needed something more flexible.

    I didn’t want to be time-boxed since we were planning to work simultaneously on a few independent small projects which would be hard to synchronize if we wanted to put them all in one team-wide sprint. Creating independent sprints for each of projects was a complete overkill since you don’t really need Scrum sprint for a one-and-a-half-person project.

    Actually I’d say we were at the point where we were too flexible for agile methods. Now, go burn me in flames for being iconoclast.

    After some discussions we collectively agreed we wouldn’t adopt Scrum as a whole but would use some of techniques used there and some other ideas we thought were good. In the next post in the series you’ll find more details how we initially organized our development.

    Keep an eye on the whole story.

  • The Kanban Story

    My current team works with Kanban for some time already. For all of us this is a kind of experiment on live organism. Ongoing experiment. That’s what led me to an idea of The Kanban Story – a set of posts which are a logbook of our cruise with Kanban.

    The story has its beginning and several chapters since some things already happened since we started our friendship with Kanban. There’s no end however. I don’t know what we’re going to end up with but I’m going to share with you all ups and downs which we encounter along the road.

    Hopefully this will become a kind of manual which helps with other Kanban implementations and generally with your work on projects and teams.

    Technically it would work as pretty much every series on this blog – I will publish new chapter of The Kanban Story every week or so and you’d be able to find links all of them which are already published below since this post will be updated every time new post in series appears on Software Project Management.

    1. The Beginning
    2. Initial Methodology
    3. First Issues
    4. Discovery of Kanban
    5. Implementation of Kanban
    6. Kanban Board
    7. What We Do And What We Don’t Do
    8. Kanban Board Evolution
    9. Kanban Alone Is Not Enough
    10. I Don’t Know, Experiment
    11. Throwing Sticky Notes Out
    12. Pseudo Iterations
    13. Kanban Board Revisited
    14. Kanban Boosters
    15. Measuring Lead Time
    16. Coarse-Grained Estimation
    17. Swarming
    18. When and Why We Abuse Limits
    19. Small Tricks Do the Job
    20. Moving Cards Back
    21. Retrospectives
    22. Standard-Sized Features
    23. Skipping Part of Process
    24. Kanban Board Should Reflect the Reality