How Much is Kanban Being Used in Your Organization

[#1]

Hey Everyone!

As an Accredited Kanban Trainer and a former Kanban Coach in my organization, I am always interested to hear of other's use of Kanban where they work. 

In my previous company, we were pretty much an exclusive Kanban shop with our more than 50 product teams. We were able to move from twice weekly deployments of code when I arrived more than 8 years ago to hundreds if not thousands of deployments every month. 

So, how much usage of Kanban is there in your organization? 

Or if you just have questions about Kanban - fire away!

[Markku Kunnas]

In our company Kanban board is the main tool what we are using.  Could you share your experience/guidance how to use the Kanban board with a team which have lot of IT operational related tasks? 

In practice we have lot of unplanned activities what pop-ups during the day which needs to be mitigated. As well many enquiries to implement various tasks which comes all of a sudden. Sometimes I feel frustrated when a need to fill 20-30 user stories/tasks  daily, meaning spending lot of administrative time for just reporting the ad-hoc tasks on kanban board. 

In addition, do you have some kind of repository of different useful search strings when using "view all issues & filters" ?  It takes long time to consider  what is the best filtering string:  For example "from project = xx AND resolution = yy WHERE Date .."  kind of strings,  how to search/filter the cases where I am the assignee during certain cadence which are closed or open. 

Thank you in advance for your view! 

[Walter Buggenhout]

I've worked with many teams too implementing some form of scrum, kanban, scrumban or alike. Something I definitely find worth sharing, is that I've seen many teams struggle in deciding what type of process would be best for them: scrum or kanban. And in many cases, I've seen teams choose kanban because scrum is too heavy to maintain as a process.

While the continuous flow of a kanban process does not seem to require that many meetings or ceremony, in that lies the biggest caveat: to run a kanban team effectively, more maturity is required within the team than for a scrum team. While moving tickets through the board is not at all difficult, detecting where things can be improved or which items need to done first is much more challenging.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout 

That matches my experience as well: teams effectively using Kanban practices required more discipline and autonomy-maturity than teams using Scrum (which has a lot of "fuzzy guiderails" IMHO).  And I have helped teams that started with Scrum, found it didn't fit some of their methods/work patterns, evolved to Kanban, got their unplanned work under control, and then returned to Scrum, but with a better level of effectiveness using it to deliver value.  While some others just failed to succeed with any method (Scrum, Kanban, etc.) until they dealt with accountability issues.

Regarding your note about Kanban practices and meetings (i.e. agile events), in my experience typical Kanban teams who do not need meetings are service-only teams...with some incident management tool feeding their queue.  Teams who needed to deliver planned and unplanned work often found it better to start with more structured practices like from Kanban Method (as described by David Anderson and others)...and that has more (and more clearly defined) agile events than Scrum.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Hey @John Funk !

Back in my old job we kinda using a lot of kanban, but not in the kanban since (top thing on the board have priority), but as a guide to what needed to be done.

In my current work, we don't use kanban at all :)

Issues (as a list) is doing the work, alongside with our own dashboards to know what needs to be done.

[John Funk]

Thanks for sharing, Alex!