Visualization is everything, the key point in Kanban is the use of a board. On it, all team members see tasks, their priorities and current status:
Kanban for IT development - image
We hit the advantages
Before we tell you about the specifics of using Kanban, let's draw your attention to the problems it solves:
A way to cheer up sales
If your company is struggling to deliver projects on time, Kanban can help. Or if you suddenly realize that you are delivering your last project and the new one has not arrived yet, Kanban is your friend.
How does it work? You see all your projects and their stages of completion/incompleteness. This way it is easy to coordinate the work of sales managers - it is worth pushing or pausing.
Team Loading Transparency
Maintaining a Google spreadsheet to track designers' and programmers' workload is cumbersome, inconvenient, and time-consuming. Kanban will help you assess an employee's workload at a glance and protect you from burnout and chaos.
How does it work? On the board, you see the number of developer tasks and what stage each of them is at. This way, you can quickly assess the workload and see who can be assigned additional tasks.
We press on the gas
In large companies, it can be difficult to understand which development stage does not produce the desired result quickly and correctly. Kanban visualizes “waste”.
How does it work? You can immediately see where development is lagging behind in terms of deadlines and which department needs to be strengthened.
And even financial planning
You won’t read about this application of Kanban in standard articles. We learned about this “trick” in a case study of one of the IT companies. We’ll point out right away that this method is suitable for chinese malaysia cell phone number data a small company and is more aimed at motivating the team:
With a large number of projects, the actual revenue often does not match the planned one. Kanban visualizes the financial flows for each project. This will allow you to see what revenue each project will bring at each stage.
How does it work? Next to each task, we indicate the amount that we can receive per month. This way, we evaluate the efficiency and compare the planned budget with the real one. You can increase the motivation of the team by attaching the amount on a red sticker when you need to push especially hard for an important project.
Now that you know about the real Kanban tools, you can start implementing it in your team!
How to make a Kanban board?
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The board is a table. We recommend including the following columns:
Project objectives
A useful column for motivating the team and keeping everyone on the same page. Put the global goals of the project here, both from the customer's side and taking into account the profit for the company itself.
Backlog
All the project tasks that are eagerly awaiting implementation are collected here. From here the team takes priority tasks and rearranges them into “in progress” tasks.
Design development
The task hangs here until the interface design meets the customer's requirements, user experience and usability.
Development
This column visualizes the progress of the product's programming. When a task is placed in this section, it means the team is working on it.
Testing
While testers are checking the product, the task is in this column. If errors are found, the task is returned to the backlog.
Done
Completed tasks are stored here.
Urgently
There are situations when a priority task appears that was not included in the Backlog. For example, you urgently need to fix the site server. The “urgent” column provides for such cases. If a task appears in this column, it must be completed as quickly as possible, temporarily abandoning other tasks.
Limiting “simultaneity”
At the bottom of each column are numbers. They show the number of tasks that can be performed simultaneously. Each team selects this number individually. If there are 10 developers in the team, and the limit number is 5, then they can work on no more than five tasks at a time. If you set the limit to 10, then everyone will work on a separate task, which will have a negative effect on overall efficiency and development time.
But in the “urgent” column there can only be one task!
Variability
Adapt the column names to the team. Sometimes they add a “documentation” column or use a more detailed “development” column.
For Artjoker's internal departments, we adapt the Kanban board as follows:
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How to work effectively with a Kanban board?
Record the time it took to develop each stage.
Record the time it takes for the team to fully implement the project. After analyzing this data, you can advise customers on the approximate development time.
Don't forget about motivation. Conduct morning standups at the Kanban board. The team talks about yesterday's successes and plans what tasks to complete today.
Retrospective: Every few weeks, hold a process review, discuss successes and problem areas.
Kanban Values
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The main principle of Kanban is to limit unnecessary work so that it does not exceed the team's throughput:
there are no clear time boundaries
there are fewer tasks for the team than in SCRUM, but they are larger in volume
reducing the amount of work being performed simultaneously
shifting attention from the speed of working on one task to the average time of the entire cycle
Kanban as a tool helps each developer feel their importance on the overall project map. The team involvement percentage is very high.
