“But…we do that already”

The benefits of visual, accessible tools.

I gave a presentation last week to our PD organization on Kanban.  I am by no means an expert on the subject, but my team had been using it for a couple weeks with success.  I thought the larger team would benefit from an introduction to the framework.

One aspect to Kanban is the team board.  It is similar to the Scrum team board, with a few modifications such as capacity and a focus on task flow.  Here is our Kanban team board which I showed in my presentation.  The picture is a couple weeks old and it has changed since then, but the basic concepts remain the same:

After spending most of the hour long presentation outlining Kanban and how it worked, a co-worker spoke up and said “But…we already do this”.  He was not specifically referring to Kanban, but to the activities involved with it.  The example context I was using at the time was on defect resolution.  In hindsight it probably was not the best example since it limited the scope of what Kanban could provide, but it did lead to the question above which forced me to think from his perspective.

It was a good statement and I am glad he made it.

His statement centered around the following points:

1. We already assign defects to the right team members
2. We do reassign defects to balance capacity between team members
3. We have an email notification system in place when the state of a defect changes (e.g. ‘verify this fix’ & ‘the defect is closed’)

On the surface Kanban appears to reinvent the wheel, at least the outcomes of the practices stated above.  Like many things in lean and agile development, sometimes the benefits can be spotted when you look outside of the activity itself and focus on the leading and trailing effects of the activity.

Here are some of the benefits as I see them compared with our processes as I understand them today:

1) In a few seconds I can see the status of my team.  Specifically, I can look at our Kanban board and see blocked tasks, overcapacity on a team member or members, under capacity issues, any new tasks that entered the board, and any tasks that have been recently completed.  No spreadsheets, websites, or databases.  Just one look over my shoulder.  It is simple and effective.

2) I can watch other team members adjust the board as it happens.  In other words, I have more opportunities to respond to a change as it happens.  On our team I have done the following:

1. Congratulate a team member on completing a difficult task.
2. Ask why a task is suddenly blocked and if I can help. 
3. Ask a question about any new task I see.
4. Spot trends and potential issues.

3) The team organizes its own tasks, without the help of management.  We take responsibility for who does what.  We have a limited subset of prioritized tasks we need to address in our backlog.  We pull from this backlog to start working on new tasks.  This triggers management to fill in the backlog with replacement tasks.  No meeting needed.  We only need to involve management if we need guidance or insight on a task.

Assigning and reassigning tasks takes less than a few seconds.  If it is a defect (which we track using an external tool), we do not need to assign it to the team member that is fixing it until it is actually fixed.  This way a task can move between team members with no overhead.

Also, having the board in front of us allows any team member to add new tasks in seconds.

4) Notification happens when an item enters or leaves a column on the board.  Since we have a limit on how much work we can focus on at any given time, we immediately notice the change.  This is a boon for me because I try to use my email sparingly.  I find wading through the 30+ daily emails to be distracting.  One less email means one less email I have to find.  One glance at the board and I see if my solutions have passed testing and is considered done.

All is not roses with Kanban.  We are still wrestling with the right columns and trying to discover a good way to track certain issues.  We also have not explored how it could work with distributed teams.  At this time I will say, for our team, the benefits have far outweighed the inconveniences.

For some people, what we do currently may satisfy them and that is ok.  Every team needs to figure out which tool it wants to use to accomplish its efforts.  Personally, I find Kanban to be more convenient and easier to use.