No one has any visibility into what teams are doing!

Does this Sound Familiar?

No one has any visibility into what teams are doing!

We keep getting surprised– we had no awareness that was coming!

We cannot see how work and value flow from idea to consumption by a customer!

We were counting on you getting your part done; we have a dependency on it, and there was no warning of how far out your work is being pushed!

Far too often, there is a lack of visibility into workflow and work in progress. When work is not visible, we often have issues in the flow of value to customers. Work that is not visible tends to be:

• Harder to manage
• Less predictable
• Longer to deliver
• Invisible to downstream activities
• Lacking effective dependency management

A value delivery flow factor is making the workflow and work visible. You cannot efficiently manage what is not visible. When work is visualized, surprises are reduced, flow increases, work in process goes down, and collaboration goes up.

How to Visualize Work

Our training workshops and coaching cover many practices and techniques to support making work visible. These are a few examples of my go-to practices that a Value Delivery Manager uses:

• Kanban Board – Iteration/Sprint
• Kanban Board – Feature(s)
• Kanban Board – Minimum Business Increment(s)
• Kanban Board – Intake Queue
• Kanban Board – Improvement Plan
• Dependency Board(s)
• Value Stream Mapping
• Dynamic Challenges Board

Visualizing work enables improved management and delivery of value. It also supports other value delivery flow factors, such as identifying delays or work in progress levels.

Kanban Boards

I will focus on three of my highest recommendations regarding getting value from Kanban boards.

Recommendation 1: columns for value-adding time and columns for waiting time.

Recommendation 2: explicit agreements on how work can move from one column to the next or backward.

Recommendation 3: boards for work in progress at different levels, such as sprint, feature, and MBI, and how to quickly see their connections. A generated board in a tool like Jira is valuable; however, boards on a virtual canvas like Miro can provide a higher level of value.

In this article, I am focusing on recommendation one, using the setup for a Kanban board supporting a timeboxed approach (sprint or iteration). I will cover the second and third recommendations in the following two articles.

Many of you will have used or at least seen a Kanban board. For those that have not, this is a technique to visualize a workflow. Work items (“cards”) move from left to right, progressing through the workflow stages.

Using a board to visualize your workflow is one of the best techniques I have seen provide value at a low cost to implement and maintain. However, the setup can be too simple, which often is a missed opportunity.

This video brings the Kanban boards of figures one through three to life

Figure 1 is an example of the most basic Kanban boards. The board has just three columns: “to-do,” “in progress,” and “done.” Using three columns is the minimum we would have on a board.

Figure 2 is a typical agile team board used for managing the work in a timeboxed approach (sprint/iteration). The first and last columns are the same as the basic board. In this usage, the to-do column is the work the team committed to for that timebox. The middle columns indicate work at important stages – in development, in testing (QA), and in acceptance.

In my experience, the additional columns in this example provide important information, but adding a few more workflow states increases value significantly. Specifically, adding columns for when a work item is waiting for the next value-adding activity to begin is invaluable. Figure 3 is my recommended Kanban board setup for managing work in a sprint/iteration.

Why are the three extra columns so valuable? You can SEE the value adding time in process and the waiting time in progress. Without this approach (or something similar), you do not have information that provides insight into the following:

• Is work taking longer than it should?
• Are we moving work from one state to another BEFORE we are ready?
• Do we have too much work in progress based on our capacity?
• Do we have a gap in skills/experience causing delays?
• When work goes backward (such as when a bug is found), do we know how often this happens and the impact of the extra time to complete it?

Using a Kanban board visualizes the workflow and work in progress easier and better than any other technique I have observed. Moreover, putting one into practice is a very low level of effort. Likewise, improving your Kanban board to provide additional insights and detection of a flow problem is straightforward and requires little effort.

For more information on Kanban boards and improving your flow of value delivery management, please visit our learning platform.?Learn Value Stream Management & Delivery

About the Author

Joshua Barnes is the founder of Process Mentors; a consultancy focused on improving ways of working. Over the past two decades, Joshua and his staff have had a breadth of engagements, including culture change, increasing productivity while reducing risk and waste, and focusing on the fewest things that significantly impact people, performance, and outcomes.

Joshua’s focus is Disciplined Agile and value stream management, improving the environment in which delivery teams work, thus increasing the flow of value to customers. He is an international speaker, LinkedIn Learning author, host of several live stream series, and a published author.