IT Operations version of Kanban
You might have heard the term, you might read something about it but only few of you have experience in it. Kanban means ‘signboard’ in Japanese and stands for a management method where you use a board to visualise tasks and to get them processed by one or more teams.
The Problem
Even in Operations teams there is the constant search for merging the work stream and the planning. The biggest challenge within all operations teams is to tackle unplanned work while working on planned projects. This unplanned work directly impacts the planned work causing long delays. If you start working on a small project for three days and you get pulled in some priority unplanned work, those three days are most likely wasted …show more content…
Working on more than one task at the same time will always take longer time than working on these tasks sequentially and will increase stress levels on a single team member. As we all know stress lowers morale.
As all teams in an organisation also operations teams need to provide expected delivery dates. Given the problem described above not meeting those delivery dates increases frustration at the internal clients.
The Solution
There is a proven and effective tool to tackle the mentioned problem. It is not the solution to everything that is going wrong in you operations team and you still need to manage your team but if the method is accepted by the whole team it can be highly beneficial.
Most people know Kanban for development teams but it has also proven itself for operation teams. The key features of Kanban are:
• Limit work in progress: Only a set number of things can be in progress at any one time for the whole team.
• Prioritize completion of work in progress over new work: Anything already in progress should be completed before new work is taken into the system. Getting completed work approved should come before taking new work into the …show more content…
Everyone on the team presents the things they think need to be done. Those are added to the backlog and we then take on the amount of work we think we can complete. The planned work is then actually scheduled on Monday, and often with a few changes.
To determine the amount of work you can take on in a next week you can look back and see how many you have done in the weeks before averaging it out over the amount of people working on the tasks. You can use that estimation to determine how many tasks you plan for the week to come.
If during the week a tasks comes up that is really urgent you can write a card an put it right at the top of the queue to be picked up first. For priority 1 issues you can just assign a dedicated team member and his tasks on the Kanban board will just sit idle until the P1 issue is solved.
The main idea of the work slots is that it should be transferable. If someone is ill for example it should be possible for another team member to pick up and finish that task. The tasks are owned by the team in general. This means all team members should be able to work on all tasks seeing the end to end process and improving
You might have heard the term, you might read something about it but only few of you have experience in it. Kanban means ‘signboard’ in Japanese and stands for a management method where you use a board to visualise tasks and to get them processed by one or more teams.
The Problem
Even in Operations teams there is the constant search for merging the work stream and the planning. The biggest challenge within all operations teams is to tackle unplanned work while working on planned projects. This unplanned work directly impacts the planned work causing long delays. If you start working on a small project for three days and you get pulled in some priority unplanned work, those three days are most likely wasted …show more content…
Working on more than one task at the same time will always take longer time than working on these tasks sequentially and will increase stress levels on a single team member. As we all know stress lowers morale.
As all teams in an organisation also operations teams need to provide expected delivery dates. Given the problem described above not meeting those delivery dates increases frustration at the internal clients.
The Solution
There is a proven and effective tool to tackle the mentioned problem. It is not the solution to everything that is going wrong in you operations team and you still need to manage your team but if the method is accepted by the whole team it can be highly beneficial.
Most people know Kanban for development teams but it has also proven itself for operation teams. The key features of Kanban are:
• Limit work in progress: Only a set number of things can be in progress at any one time for the whole team.
• Prioritize completion of work in progress over new work: Anything already in progress should be completed before new work is taken into the system. Getting completed work approved should come before taking new work into the …show more content…
Everyone on the team presents the things they think need to be done. Those are added to the backlog and we then take on the amount of work we think we can complete. The planned work is then actually scheduled on Monday, and often with a few changes.
To determine the amount of work you can take on in a next week you can look back and see how many you have done in the weeks before averaging it out over the amount of people working on the tasks. You can use that estimation to determine how many tasks you plan for the week to come.
If during the week a tasks comes up that is really urgent you can write a card an put it right at the top of the queue to be picked up first. For priority 1 issues you can just assign a dedicated team member and his tasks on the Kanban board will just sit idle until the P1 issue is solved.
The main idea of the work slots is that it should be transferable. If someone is ill for example it should be possible for another team member to pick up and finish that task. The tasks are owned by the team in general. This means all team members should be able to work on all tasks seeing the end to end process and improving