Lessons learned from the usage of the Kanban method between the first nine months of our blogger service team

Christoph Dibbern
3 min readFeb 24, 2022

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The work together and getting things done frequently over more than one department and team in the context of a company-wide blog service is a huge challenge. Therefore I created the following list of lessons learned from three different dimensions.

Organizational

  • Gaining a common understanding of the current situation of the blog service and the work organization with the Kanban Method was essential — next time from the beginning, not after two months at the end of June
  • Introduce earlier a team Kanban replenishment and team retrospective meeting cadence of two weeks instead of four weeks
  • Measure and visualize the process with the Kanban metrics from the beginning so that future potentials are fast and obvious and also swarming techniques on e.g. blockers can be applied

Technical

  • Use online whiteboards to foster a common remote collaboration and brainstorming for the current shared service structures and the evolutionary next steps to gain transparency & improve the structures
  • Document the blog service Kanban system policies well in the MS Teams channel Wiki/notes
  • Use ticket tools like MS Teams planner to visualize, manage and improve the Kanban board and simplify our remote work and the creation of metrics

Personal

  • Be aware of my own responsibility as a Kanban agile facilitator and Kanban expert
  • Take care frequently of the arranged policies and foster alignment and learning to improve the policies by the cross-service team to the policies
  • Foster from the beginning a common understanding in the blog service team for the sense of limiting WIP in the end-to-end-process

Read more about this case study in the other articles and do not hesitate to give me feedback and let your comments below: (1) An overview of the overall case study and approach, (2) an article about making policies explicit, (3) an article about the applied Kanban metrics, and (4) an article about the lessons learned in our blog service team (this article).

Literature

Kanban Method Guide

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

Kanban Maturity Model: A Map to Organizational Agility, Resilience, and Reinvention

Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact

Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers

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