Networked Kanban - NOOP.NL
I am wondering if maybe some people should try and replace their regular Kanban board with a networked Kanban variant. I love the principles behind Kanban. I really do! Despite the occasional clash with the Great Leader. But I have been unsuccessful trying to apply a Kanban board to the work I’m doing with my team members. I simply cannot seem to fit the tool to the way we do our jobs… The phases in our work are not sequential, and thus we cannot easily map our work onto a value stream. Our work is a value network. The work items are not coherent. They split and merge and multiply in many ways before value is delivered to very different stakeholders. We cannot swarm around a board because our work is not collocated. It seems we need partial visualization of work in different locations. Regular Kanban Of course, I’m quite sure the Kanban experts can come up with modifications and extensions to customize the Kanban tool to the way we do our work. But I feel it’s like turning a bicycle into a shopping cart by adding extra wheels and a big basket. I seems more effective to me simply to find an actual shopping cart. In other words, I want a tool with native support for non-linear flow, transformative work, and dispersed teams. And thus I was glad that Alan Shalloway organized a “birds of a feather” discussion at LESS2011 to talk about non-linear forms of Kanban. The issues […]
