Make Process Policies Explicit

By chris.hefley on June 6, 2011 — No comments

In his book, Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business , David Anderson identified 5 core properties that have been observed to be present in each successful implementation of the Kanban Method.

1. Visualize the Workflow
2. Limit WIP
3. Manage Flow
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
5. Improve Collaboratively (using Models and the Scientific Method)

#4 on this list, “Make Process Policies Explicit” is, in our opinion, a key enabler of evolutionary, collaborative change in a Kanban System. As the organization identifies opportunities to improve the system, this knowledge is “written in” to the Kanban board itself. This allows us to capture and preserve organizational learning by building it into the system we use to manage our work – the Kanban board.

There are many ways to modify a Kanban board to Make Process Policies Explicit. One is to redesign the board, to specify how the work flows. Another is to use WIP limits to explicitly state our policy about how much WIP we are able to take on.

LeanKit Kanban contains two unique features that further enable a Kanban team to Make Process Policies Explicit. One is to use policies for a Class of Service. Each class of service defined for your LeanKit Kanban board can have an associated policy. When viewing an item with that class of service, a LeanKit user can right-click on the card and choose “view CoS policy” to view the Class of Service policy.

For example, here’s a shot of our internal development team’s policy for the “Customer Flight” class of service

Another (and brand new) feature in LeanKit is the ability to define a policy (or a “legend”) for a particular lane or sublane. For example, what is the team’s Definition of Done? As with other board configuration, this is quickly and easily done within the board editor with a WYSIWYG text-editor that even allows linking to longer policy documents stored elsewhere. All the board users then have the ability to quickly reference the lane policies by hovering over an icon on the lane header.

Editing the Policy

Viewing the Policy

This key feature once again sets LeanKit apart from our competitors in the Kanban tool space – as the premier Kanban tool for the serious practitioner.

This new feature is just one of several recently deployed new features for LeanKit Kanban Team Edition (details).