How we use Kanban to introduce

Purpose of using Kanban

Visualize the work of project management.

Introduction to Kanban Layout

Note:

1. Is the kanban photo of our real work.

2. Due to the size of the material and office space, so we put the original two Kanban content on a board-the above is the development of the group version of the Kanban, the following is the co-operation of the partner system of the work of the Kanban board-the following in the introduction of only the internal version of the development as an example of the introduction.

From top to bottom, the entire Kanban board is divided into three parts: title, emergency channel, normal channel.

In the figure of the red arrow pointing to the right line is the emergency channel, because the urgent work is relatively small, so I only planned a small strip, and the majority of the space left to the normal working channel.

Heading from left to right for each stage of the work-how the work phase is divided to see the specific project situation, my project is divided into:

The leftmost is the backlog: work that is not currently started.

Next to the backlog is ready: The work here has been decided to implement in the current iteration.

Then develop: This development phase is divided into doing and done two.

Then it is test: indicates the tests.

And then there are two pre-releases: Here the pre-release is divided into two stages for the sake of statistical convenience when making the report (the report will be referred to later).

There is no release phase because the release phase is not within my purview and cannot directly manipulate the work at that stage.

It is generally thought that there should be an "analysis" phase between ready and develop, in fact our kanban is actually at the beginning of this stage, but then it was removed, Mainly because: 1. The system is already operational phase, need not usually small, no special analysis team; 2. At this stage, basically the manager is doing the job, few other members do the job, and the manager himself can directly analyze the need to get ready, but there is no need to have an analysis phase alone.

In short, each stage of the work is designed by the project's management team, and it is not immutable.

There is also a number in the title of the Develop and test two sections indicating the number of work limits at this stage, note here:

1. The blocking work is not counted-a small pink note is affixed to the blocked work on the board.

2. The work in the emergency channel is not counted.

3. The two phases of development and development are shared with a workload limit (if there is also "in-analysis" and "analytical completion" are also shared with a work quantity limit).

How Kanban works about cards

A card is a work that can be delivered independently-a team manager (perhaps a product manager, a project manager, or a development manager) needs to split the work into smaller units, but it needs to be independently developed, tested, and released.

The contents of the card usually include: each stage of the processing staff (can have processing time), the card to the ready date (that is, the start date), the card to the pre-release date of the day (the end date "actually to the release is not the end, but because the release team is separate, not in my team, So the pre-release as the end of the work "), forecast workload (follow-up on how to predict the workload).

How the normal work area works

The work in the backlog should be split and independently developed, tested and delivered – but if the project is larger or the project needs to be more complex and requires an "analysis" phase, then the work can be split into separate deliverables after the analysis phase.

Second, the work in the backlog is usually to be classified, for example: can be divided into "normal demand", "the need for the duration or resource constraints", "internal continuous improvement work", or divided into "demand", "system problem", "internal optimization" and so on--this job we did not do, the reader to see whether we need to do

Third, the work from the backlog to ready: This job to the product manager to do, usually this principle is generally the more important, the more first realized (but in the case of large demand, if always pick important to do, there will be unimportant things have not been arranged, so we later modified the Kanban, such as. In fact, it is also possible not to modify the Kanban, as long as the product manager's own one for control.

Iv. Follow-up work is entirely "pull" the way to run-"pull" means that the next phase of the staff to take the initiative to go to the previous phase of the work, which is contrary to the traditional way of working (the traditional way of working is usually assigned by the superior, rather than the task of their own)-- Developers from ready to work to "research and development", after the completion of the card to "research and development", the tester from the "research and development" to pull the work to the test stage, after the test is completed to move the card to pre-release.

1. Careful readers can think of: the development phase is divided into "development" and "development completed" two parts of the reason is to serve the "pull" this way of working (must have a visual representation of "development done"), the test colleagues can know what to take to come over. And in all the subsequent statistics, we still make the development phase as a whole to be counted.

Five, in the pull work to their own stage of work need to pay attention to "work limit", such as: The following figure, the research and development phase is limited to 8 jobs, the "research and development" and "research and development" work together can not add up to more than 8.

1. The reason for the "Work quantity limit" is to control the speed of delivery and to control performance bottlenecks.

2. First, we need to have a consensus that "in an agile team, we want each member to be able to do all phases of the work (if a member can only do one stage of the work, then the value of this member will be less than the members of the membership)". Therefore, in my team, I do not control the division of work, that is: Test colleagues can "pull" ready to do the work to develop, the development of colleagues can "pull" to "development done" work to do the test.

3. In practice, the speed of work at each stage is difficult to balance. The phenomenon in my team is that "the speed of development is faster than testing", so that if we do not have a "workload limit" then there will be a lot of work backlog in the "development complete" phase.

4. In order to avoid a backlog of work, we usually have two approaches: a. Managers to control, when the development done too much work, assigned a part of the developers to participate in the work of the test; B. Increase the "work volume limit" to allow team members to control spontaneously and find that work data in the development phase is saturated, Then go to the other stages of work. We chose to give the group a spontaneous control.

5. This achieves our goal of controlling the flow of work: when part of the stage is too fast, resources are automatically transferred to other stages.

Vi. work on congestion: the so-called blocking work refers to the work that is caused by some external causes (for example, the need to be linked to another system, but the other system has a problem needs to be modified, the work will be temporarily suspended for a period of time), this kind of work we use a note to mark the cause of this work obstruction, After blocking the end of the line to remove (there is actually a problem, that is: in the statistical work time, the time of the blockage is not a good way to count, because the work back flow when there is no blockage of the traces).

Seven, add: When the test found a bug, the work is still in the testing phase, the development of colleagues directly involved in the change of the problem, rather than the card back. When there are too many bugs, there is also a blockage, which requires development to tilt the resources to the test phase to resolve the accumulation of this part of the workload--but this is not a work block caused by external causes, so there is no sign of work blocking.

How the emergency work area works

Urgent work is not much, but once it happens, it needs to be dealt with immediately--an urgent job is usually a system problem, a very urgent need--the way it works is not based on "pull", but the team leader actively pushes the progress of the work and assigns the work directly.

There's no more talking here.

How to predict workload

The prediction of the workload is usually the more familiar with the relevant system logic, and the better the design ability, the more accurate the prediction of the people, in theory, the team should not make joint decisions. But a small number of elites make decisions that do not work in a way that is conducive to team members ' progress, so we evaluate the workload together by playing this predictive card.

The style of the card is as follows:

One, there are multiple digital cards and a question mark card and a hot coffee card.

Second, the "question mark" card represents a complete lack of concept of the work, unable to assess the workload.

Three, "Coffee" card for "I am already very tired, need to rest, so do not evaluate the demand".

The digital card stands for "My estimate of the job", the larger the number, the greater the workload (or the complexity of the work).

Five, the meaning of the figure itself is not clear (that is, 1 does not mean that it is 1 days, also does not mean 1 hours), but by the players to grasp the card, the more the number of cards, team members on the significance of the number of the more consistent- The reason is not clear specific meaning is because: different people do the same job the working time is not the same (some people 1 hours to fix, and some people may not be able to make the three days).

Six, the larger the number here, the greater the difference in numbers, the reason is: the greater the job or the more difficult the job, the accuracy of its assessment is also lower.

The way it works is this:

One, once a week work communication meeting.

Second, let the most understanding of the work of the people first introduced the work, we have questions at this time can be proposed.

Third, after each introduction of a job content began to play cards.

Four, dozen "question mark" card number more than three, need to re-communicate this work-we have more than 20 people to play cards-if the group is small, it is recommended that everyone understand the work.

Five, do not let other people see before the card, waiting for everyone to choose the cards together after the card.

If someone is making a number that is too big or too small, say the reason-some people may be wrong in their ideas or design complex-after communication, play cards again.

Seven, if everyone's idea is similar, but the taxi card is not the same, then the understanding of this figure is different, at this time to take the majority of the figure or approximate average. After a period of time, the understanding of the numbers will be approaching.

Report

We'll do two reports here (I'll just list the charts, not the numbers).

We do not draw a Burndown chart or a map of general project management, because the work is continuous and not burndown for our operations.

The first chart looks like this.

The horizontal axis here is the "date", the vertical is the "Cumulative work Quantity", each line is the cumulative workload of each stage of the growth trend.

Since our rule is that "work" can only move from left to right and not back, the polyline in this graph will never fall.

This diagram is used to analyze the work bottleneck and the intuitive to see the speed of work, but this analysis is described here is more troublesome, so do not say, if there is a strong demand, I can write an article to describe the analysis of this figure.

The second table looks like the one below.

The horizontal axis of this table is the number of days the work lasts, and the height of the column is the amount of work.

This table can be made one for each version, or has been accumulated.

Historical data combined with "projected workload" can be used to analyze the effectiveness of the team (the ability of the team to undertake future needs).

Postscript

A lot of content, but I do not literary talent, just Journal-style to remember a bit.

Completely by the memory of this article, so there will certainly be something to miss, later thought to fill up or write other articles to do the supplement.

How we use Kanban to introduce