Kanban: Optimising for predictability – presentation

In the next couple of weeks I’ll be presenting at a ‘Lightning Lunch’ at Sigma UK on Kanban and how you can optimise the flow of tiny tasks (stories) to make predictable deliverables. This presentation is based on a blog post I wrote some time ago on the same subject.

I’m currently working on a very large Scrum programme that uses a board very similar to a Kanban board, however, we’re not enforcing WIP limits and we only ship things once a sprint. While this in itself feels very fast and very agile to some, it’s not without risks and sometimes feels a little ‘big bang’ release due to the amount of code that is getting delivered in a single sprint. This got me thinking about the continuous test and deployment cycles within Kanban teams as a potential enhancement to our current process.

Kanban doesn’t pretend to solve the problems, but it does allow teams to focus on continuous delivery and continuous improvement. It encourages teams to work as a multi-disciplinary unit rather than as a collection of silos and functions.

I should say that I have only ever done this ‘agency-side’ and as a result commercial constraints sometimes limit our ability to apply too aggressive WIP limits. I’d be really interested in hearing from anyone who has experience of running Kanban projects for multiple customers within a software/design agency. I’m sure there is some additional tweeks to help the implementation.