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Flow. Discover Problems and Waste in Kanban – 2 Years Later

December 28th, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

Almost 2 years ago I published the Flow. Discover Problems and Waste in Kanban post. The idea was quite simple: visualize the flow of a single user story or bug, and track their life cycle to Done:

You can spot such problems like delays and re-work very fast this way:

Now we’ve brought this idea to life. The Flow chart for every user story, bug and feature will be available shortly in TargetProcess v2.22.9.

The chart gives answers to a whole lot of hands-on questions:

  • For how many days has this User Story been in this particular state?
  • Were there any delays?
  • Was there any re-work?
  • Who was responsible for the User Story?
  • When were Bugs and Tasks added and closed?
  • How much time was spent each day?
  • Were there any impediments?

Let’s look at some examples. The user story on the chart below has been  in Open state for 25 days (it means, in the Backlog). Then it jumped right into In Progress state. Two developers (Alla and Vladimir) started working on it (so it was pair programming). They’d been working for 3 days and then the story was moved into Re-open state. This is quite surprising, most likely they had to switch to something else (no good). Then they got back and spent 15 days working on this user story. That’s way too long. Most likely there were switches as well,  so this should be investigated.

Starting from Oct-18 the progress was very good: development went smooth, tester found several bugs and they were fixed in 2-3 days. Finally, the user story was released to production with no more delays.

You immediately get a high-level overview: delays and up/down state transitions. It is a clear sign of some problems, the systematic ones or not known so far, but we already have some background info to start an investigation).

Let’s check another example. It looks like the user story on the chart below was taken to development right as it was added. That’s true in fact, since it was a customer request to which we reacted immediately. It was implemented in a single day, and there was a small delay before tester took it to the  testing phase. We found quite many bugs and fixed them in 2 days, everything is fine. But then the completed user story was hanging in Release Branch state for 11 days, and that’s no good.

We’re planning to extend this Flow Chart and put more information there (comments, attachments, etc.) The goal is to provide the complete production timeline uncovering hidden malignant patterns and problems. You should be able to get a high-level overview in an instant and dig into as many details as possible.

Categories: agile tool, kanban, lean, metric, visualization Tags:
  • Yuval

    Very cool visualization and capability. Definitely a step helping a team focus their continuous improvement towards faster cycle times and less waste

    One question – is there an easy way to identify which stories to focus on? ( eg low/high runners on a cycle time control chart)?

    Also might be interesting to see how this applies for in-flight stories (realtime). Identify stories that are running into trouble and deal with it in realtime not wait for retrospection.

    Great feature!

  • http://www.targetprocess.com/blog Michael Dubakov

    @785fcb6324763c8f172362357f7721b4:disqus This chart is created real-time, so there are no delays at all. Currently there is no way to automatically highlight stories that might be problematic, but definitely it is possible to set some criteria like “highlight story if it sits in in progress state more than 3 days”. This functionality is not there yet, but indeed it would be very helpful. Thank you for the feedback!

  • Aliaksandr Famin

    You can create a mashup for this, as far as the chart is created via HTML+JS.

  • Jeroen

    How can kanban be used as a better alternative to project management using Gantt?

    I was wondering what your take is on the following. How can kanban best be used in a (non-IT) New Product Development process, as a better and lean alternative to traditional Project Planning using Gantt?

    Thank you in advance for your reply,

    Regards,

    Jeroen

  • http://www.targetprocess.com/ Michael Dubakov

    @9905744f86779c98aa390705e469945a:disqus  New Product Development has many uncertainties, and that is where Kanban really rocks. It does not force you to have long term plans and create fancy Gantt charts that will be never true. You can focus on most important things and correct your short term goals often.

  • http://twitter.com/Germanicus1 Peter Kerschbaumer

    I totally agree with you Michael. The ability to change priorities whenever needed and adopt to fast changing product development needs makes Kanban the number one choice. We had fantastic results in our development team and product development teams. Kanban is just about to viral in our organisation and spreading into other departments (marketing & sales).

  • Jeroen

    Thank you for your reply, Michael. I agree totally. One question however; although kanban enables you to abolish all intermediate planning dates you would otherwise plan on in a Gantt environment, you will always have some major due dates left; for example, the ultimate delivery due date and perhaps some major intermediate planning dates concerning alignment with outside vendors. With those, some leadtime planning might be incorporated as well. How do you integrate or align those with kanban-based project management?

  • Jeroen

    Thank you for your reply, Peter. Same here; kanban is spreading like wildfire with good results. However, I have some doubts about the application of kanban for a New Product Development environment, with some 40 NPD projects running at the same time. Basically with the same questions as I wrote in my reply to Michaeal, abovs. How would you implement kanban then?