When consulting, Teal Unicorn recommends this variant of Kanban that we think best suits our business clients.
We like to use swimlanes with one lane per “Initiative”, (or “feature”), meaning a chunk of work which is then broken down into individual tasks which flow through its lane as normal for Kanban. Once an initiative is finished, that frees up its lane for a new initiative. So we pull initiatives onto the board To Do in a lane, then break them into tasks which get pulled into Doing with a task WIP limit.
We still have one or two extra lanes for “Other”: Urgent, or Housework, or Miscellaneous or whatever works for the team to allow non-initiative work through. We still add up the WIP limit over all lanes.
This has many benefits:
- People can quickly see how a task relates to the value of the initiative that it is a part of. In other variants of Kanban, tasks are related to a feature/initiative by a code, but the whole point of Kanban is to make information visible and obvious,
- The backlog is much simpler: it just has the Initiatives. We don’t worry about breaking it down into “Clear-Fine” tasks until we move it into the To-Do column.
- The To-Do and Doing columns are laned by initiative instead of being one big mess.
- We are limited to how many Initiatives we can work on at once by the number of lanes, creating a WIP limit. Humans can’t deal with more than about 3 to 5 big long-running things (projects, features, roles…). If they have more, they have to re-learn every time they switch between them. (“We can only do three” – Steve Jobs).
Once the larger Initiative is complete, we remove its card and the associated tasks to clean up.
You may prefer not to display the backlog on the board. Once a lane frees up for another initiative, we have a discussion of what next to work on based on a backlog recorded somewhere else.
from our book Working Naked
See also Two Kanban Boards