Step 4: Define types of work and what ‘done’ means for them You’re almost ready to start placing work items - in the form of Kanban cards - on your board. A hallway in the office or an online platform are the usual choices. This is your first Kanban board - make sure to display it in a place where everyone involved can access it easily. You should end up with something that looks like this: If you have separate teams or projects, that run the same process, break the board horizontally to introduce swimlanes. Show the name of each stage at the top of the columns. Then break it into columns - one column for each stage of the workflow, from left to right. Get yourself a board - it may be a standard whiteboard, an electronic-style Kanban board, or just a place on a wall in your office. Once you identify the value stream and its scope, it’s time to make things visual. Step 3: Map the workflow stages to columns on a board Given that, you may decide to focus on the coding part alone, and break it into a sequence of ‘Feature requested’ > ‘In coding’ > ‘In testing’ > ‘Finished’ steps, that every feature requested by a client should go through. Also, the project handoff is a one-per-project event, while during coding, many repetitive cycles of feature implementation and testing take place. Developers don’t need to know the status of work in the contract negotiation step. The value stream provides clarity and creates a high-level how-to, making it easier to know what actions you should focus on, and which should be minimized, as they have no meaning to the end client, and hence do not increase your revenue, so should be seen as a waste.Ī value stream for a software development company may start with contract negotiations, followed by coding, and end on project documentation and handoff. No matter the process, there will always be a list of activities that turn an item, document, or piece of raw material into a product, by performing actions that increase the material’s value. Value-stream mapping is the process of naming the value-adding steps a team or a person does, to initiate and complete a piece of work. You may get surprised, that even the simple act of naming all your process stages, can reveal facts about your workflow, that you were unaware of. You can visualize your process in just a few simple steps. In Kanban, visualization of workflow means mapping distinctive steps of work into columns of a Kanban board, and tracking work items as they move through them. Humans process visual information much better than any other form of communication. From a more abstract perspective, a workflow is also the act of real work items flowing through this sequence. How to visualize your workflow?Ī workflow is the sequence of characteristic steps that tasks or products go through from the start of work to the finish. There is also another reason why getting familiar with Kanban starts with process visualization: you need to get a good understanding of how you’re working now, find out the reasons why things are done in this specific fashion, to later be able to make informed decisions about how to improve. The project manager experiences the very same benefit, from their perspective: they see what the resources are being spent on, what kind of work takes the bulk of a team’s time, and - crucially - they can spot process bottlenecks and address them. With all work items visible on a shared board, everyone knows what’s there to be done, who is engaged in which task, and, potentially - depending on the board’s nature - when specific items are expected to be done. Arguably, the strongest reason why it makes an instant impact on a team is the transparency that it allows. Workflow visualization is critical to a team’s success and is the most important aspect of the Kanban method.
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