The Agile Coach’s Cookbook by Jon Ward

Author:Jon Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2021-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Kanban Work-in-Progress Limits Recipe

Many agile teams using Scrum use a Kanban board to visualise their work and control flow. Agile teams often talk about limiting work in progress; however, the reality is slightly different in that they forget. Adding a swim lane for each individual or applying an avatar to each work item on the Kanban board may be a means to draw attention to the fact that the team is breaking their rules in terms of WIP or some other agreement.

It is a Lean principle that multitasking kills efficiency. The more work items in flight at any given time, the more context switching the team encounters, which hinders the effectiveness of their path to completion. That’s why a fundamental tenet of Kanban is to limit the amount of work in progress (WIP). A Kanban team without the scrutiny of their WIP limits is a cause for concern for an agile coach. Using the cumulative flow diagram visualises blockages and capacity constraints. Work-in-progress limits highlight bottlenecks and backups in the team’s process due to lack of focus, people or skill sets.

Control in Kanban like Scrum relies upon mathematics. This maths starts with the estimation of work items. Some teams estimate while others prefer not to estimate at all! Still, others prefer to set a direction using roadmaps, like release plans, adding details to the map regularly so that they can assess progress. Yet the team context involves fixed deadlines and multi-team release dates then a certain amount of estimation is essential.

Estimates are by their definition are inexact and can be affected by many different risk factors. The Kanban method proposes data-driven, probability-based estimation using only historical performance records.

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