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Setting up our Kanban board

Posted by: John Heintz on 05/19/2009

Last week one of my clients and I set up a Kanban board for the team. We did it as a physical board, and we're backing each card with an issue in a tracker.

We plan to use the issue tracker for these purposes:

generate a Cumulative Flow Diagram (perhaps scripting an export to CSV or Excel)
searchable index of activity
release management tracking
conversation (comments, emails, checkins) for details larger than a notecard

Here's what the board looks like:

Some details (that are hard to read):

A Prioritized Queue on the left, highest priority on top
Three workflow/VSM steps: InProgress, Review, Deployment
Review is for developer peer review, and Staging (on QA for general review)
Deployment Ready is available for production deployment, Deployed is recently deployed.
Three swimlanes: two for development activities, one for IT operations support.

This is the current prototype for the cards:

Some of the tools that we use include sticky post-it notes and Stikky Clips. (Note: We found the Stikky Clips at a teacher supply store, not a big office supply store.)

John Heintz's complete blog can be found at: http://johnheintz.blogspot.com

About John Heintz

Agile/Kanban coach, REST architect, software craftsman

John D. Heintz is a husband, father, developer, Agilist, entrepreneur. After studying electrons in college, John's intuition led him to pursue software, and he's been a digital craftsmen since. Always seeking solutions with higher leverage and deeper simplicity has led John to important methods and tools. John's approach to building systems and teams started with leading his first Scrum team in 1999, included XP and TDD, and now Agile and Lean methods are part of his daily work and consulting. John has built single-source hyperdocument SGML publishing systems, a version control CORBA/Python CMS, an AspectJ dependency acquisition framework, added test automation to many Java and .NET systems, coached a 100-person Agile/Lean game studio, and built RESTful Web integration systems. John has launched his own company, Gist Labs, to further his focus on essential innovation.

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