Cabana, Kamikaze, Kobold… No – it’s KANBAN!!!

We did it! Last week we implemented KANBAN (= methodology of incremental process improvement/pull system approach) at Tupalo.com HQ here in Vienna. After reviewing various theories of agile management over the past weeks and months, KANBAN became our best friend.

Not seeing it as an actual ‘new’ project management approach but rather as a methodology to improve our internal processes, we added a visual element to our daily work life – the KANBAN Board: transparent, colorful and extremely useful when it comes to just-in-time updates on our status quo.

We visualized our workflow and added WIP limits to each work flow step. Thus we now concentrate on a few work items at a time, achieve a sustainable pace of development and improve quality. We soon got used to the new ‘rules’ of the system and letting it evolve – which (by the way) worked out fine.

As an explanation: The little Avatars are used to indicate who is working on which item within the workflow (large Avatars for main work items/mini-me’s for supporting tasks of other work items).

Last Thursday was the day we started working with the tools that make KANBAN so practical, so we thought it would be a good opportunity to share this with you.

We will keep you posted on our experiences, issues, progress and new findings of our daily ‘walk the board’.