•••  Enabling the Agile Enterprise

2 Responses to “Kanban 101”

1. Paul says on July 15th, 2010 at 1:48 am :
   

   Hi Dennis,

   Nice presentation. I was surprised to see “estimation” under advanced topics, along with prioritisation etc. In manufacturing, a key ingredient for smooth kanban and avoiding Mura is to have equally sized units of work flowing through the system. This is known as “Production levelling”, it as always struck me that for kanban to work well in software and for smooth flow, we would need to do the same.

   So for example, we would want user stories to be all similarly sized ( a low standard deviation), to do so implies that we have done some sort of estimation and have levelled our stories so that they have equal estimates more or less.

   Is this activity really advanced? Is it not needed? Or is “levelling” essential for software kanban in the same way it is for manufacturing?

   Regards,

   Paul.

2. Dennis Stevens says on July 18th, 2010 at 5:03 pm :
   

   Paul,

   Thanks for the compliment and the comment.

   Estimating. In a perfect world you would have all stories the same size. Then you really don’t need to do any estimating – you just use your historical cycle time data to determine when it will be done. If you are working in a world where that isn’t practical the basic estimation would include being able to determine a relative size for stories. For example, XS, S, and M. Then there would some aspect of leveling on the part of the team. Just like if you pulled a high point story into a sprint you would use your judgement to pull some associated smaller stories in. The advanced topic of Estimation covers things like release planning.

   Prioritization. While Kanban provides a mechanism to support deferred commitment and a high level of flexibility, it doesn’t provide any insight into prioritization. So, developing heuristics and techniques for prioritization – particularly when there are multiple people placing demand on the organization. For example, Prioiritization may include ways to take Business Value, Risk and Performance gaps into account when triaging work as it arrives to the backlog. The advanced topic of prioritization covers some of these heuristics and techniques.

   One final point on leveling. In manufacturing, you may perform a lot of calculations to determine for the system the best way to level work coming through the system. In Kanban, much of the leveling is performed by the team – in real time – based on the status of work, the established policies and the judgement of the team.

   Dennis

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