Meet The Kanban Board

posted on 29 Apr 2011

A lot of people talk about agile. We try to be agile. Working with one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto doesn’t hurt.

Our day to day process revolves around a plexiglass kanban board. I’d like to show it to you.

Meet the kanban board.

The kanban board does a lot for us. It radiates information. It’s been called an agile innovation.

It helps us remember what we’re working on.

We know who’s working on what.

We can see what’s coming up too.

We try to keep Martin on low hanging features.

It tells us when too much is going on.

And sometimes it breaks and we have to change it.

It gives us some time to decide if things are really done.

And it asks us to show them off when they are.

After spending so much time working with this board it’s hard for me to imagine us doing our work without it. We’ve had to change and tweak it many times. As the way we work evolves, and our team changes we’ve had to adapt it to better reflect our work. The goal is to be able to look at it, at any moment, and know exactly what the status of things are. It isn’t always perfect, but it cuts down a lot on the effort we must put towards coordinating our efforts. We keep trying to get more aspects of our work reflected on the board, and that’s almost never a mistake. Everyone in the company can use it to see and communicate their work, and move cards across.

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