How It Works: Kanban+Timeline
If you’re using Kanban board as a process tool in software development, you must know that Kanban is mainly about letting the work flow through the production states.
Pull some work from backlog, get it through the pipeline, and on it goes.
Kanban is great, but it lacks one thing which matters a lot in this world plagued by time constraints. This thing is called a sense of time. If a team does some cross-project work, as they pull smaller items from a support requests backlog, for instance, they will likely want to be informed not only of a current state of a work item. They will want to know when it is safe to assume that this work item will be done, or passed to another team, etc. Trying a workaround to include this sense of time to a physical Kanban board on a wall might be a cumbersome task. Take a look:
This board has a mention of a milestone, Nov 9. The stickers are to-do items. This workaround merely informs of a fixed milestone without taking the production dynamics into account. There’s no way to give a forecast looking at this board, if the team will complete whatever their work is by November 9, judging by the pace with which they progress. Not to mention that there’s no way to see at which pace they are progressing. There are some Kanban reports that can help predict that, but they will not be available on a whiteboard, obviously. This particular workaround might work for that very team, but some other hypothetical team will want their Kanban board tailored to their time-sensitive objectives in a different way. And they would have to sweat and invent specific workarounds for visualizing their work, if they’d want more than just a date written on a board.
I’ve always wanted to help other human beings live an easier life and sweat less 🙂, and I’ve come to a conclusion that small practical improvements or hints do a better job at that than fluffed up statements of the “break things fast, disrupt, change the world” kind.
So, however simple this hint might seem, it’s the combination of Kanban and timelines that can be used to see how teams are doing with their work, and in what time they expect to complete it. That’s how such a Kanban+timeline board might look:
There are two projects on this board, and there’s a backlog for each of them. Alternatively, there can be a shared backlog. What goes next are work items laid over a stretch of time. Where the strips end is the current forecast for “Done”. Presumably, the timeline may complement the traditional Open-In Progress states on a Kanban board as well, if that’s what someone needs.
Having a timeline available as another option on top, or instead of a Kanban board, helps make sense of what’s going on with the projects in less time, pun intended. Besides, timelines keep the sense of time always present with a team (which they might be missing if they only look at a plain Kanban board). It surely is less hassle to maintain the digital Kanban+timeline board, and any stakeholder who is not immediately involved with the team’s work will quickly get an idea of what’s going on with the projects. There’s no limit to a digital timeline, and as to how it can fit into a screen. Just make sure that you’re using large enough screens.
Related:
How Timelines Help Track Progress
How Visualize: Board, List, or Timeline?
DataViz 101: 5 Reports for Kanban
Further reading:
This article is based on an earlier story.
