The Kanban Story

by Pawel Brodzinski on October 20, 2009

My current team works with Kanban for some time already. For all of us this is a kind of experiment on live organism. Ongoing experiment. That’s what led me to an idea of The Kanban Story – a set of posts which are a logbook of our cruise with Kanban.

The story has its beginning and several chapters since some things already happened since we started our friendship with Kanban. There’s no end however. I don’t know what we’re going to end up with but I’m going to share with you all ups and downs which we encounter along the road.

Hopefully this will become a kind of manual which helps with other Kanban implementations and generally with your work on projects and teams.

Technically it would work as pretty much every series on this blog – I will publish new chapter of The Kanban Story every week or so and you’d be able to find links all of them which are already published below since this post will be updated every time new post in series appears on Software Project Management.

{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

Allison October 20, 2009 at 2:13 pm

Can't wait to read your story–I was just reading about Kanban yesterday and thinking about how to implement it with my team!

Michael Dubakov October 20, 2009 at 3:28 pm

Here is our development process based on Kanban

http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2009/10/our-development-process.html

Pawel Brodzinski October 21, 2009 at 12:20 am

Michael,

Nice list. I think we're heading a bit different direction, although our situation is different too: we have smaller team and less mature product to work on.

One more difference about The Kanban Story – I want to share more a journey than show just a picture how it works at the moment. I believe it is important to show people why you've chosen to do one thing and rejected to do another and how your views have changed over the time.

Michael Dubakov October 26, 2009 at 2:05 am

Yeah, I agree that reasons behind the decisions are important. It is very good to show various trade-offs and final results.

David January 22, 2010 at 2:23 pm

Really nice article. Thanks Pawel.
I’m thinking of implementing Kanban in new project, but still don’t know which online tool to use. One which looks easy to use and lets concentrate on work is kanban tool (http://kanbantool.com). I need to give it a test run to see how it works for me.
Maybe you can write more about online kanban tools – some comparison?

Pawel Brodzinski January 22, 2010 at 3:05 pm

David,

Comparison of different web tools supporting Kanban is a very good idea but I guess nothing would trump good old hardware whiteboard if you ask me.

If I could give only one advice to any Kanban team it would be: gather in one room and put big whiteboard in a place where everyone sees it.

David January 25, 2010 at 5:31 pm

Hi Pawel,
Maybe you are right, but in my case I can’t work with traditional whiteboard because I’m working in distributed team.

Pawel Brodzinski January 25, 2010 at 11:42 pm

Yes, this makes using standard whiteboard way harder. I’ll try to add some tools focused on Kanban to my to-review list.

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