Using the advantages of making policies explicit with the Kanban Method in our finance solutions innovation unit
Many teams in bigger companies with hundreds of employees struggle in getting an appropriate overview of their work and managing their work. The Kanban Practice of “making policies explicit” enables the departments and teams to:
- visualize pull criteria
- limit work in progress
- have explicit classes of service
- and define more appropriate policies like common cadences inside teams.
You will learn how this Kanban practice can be used in a bigger environment to foster the flow of work and get a common and fast overview with an appropriate board.
This series of blog articles comprises four parts: (1) An overview of the overall case study and approach, (2) an article about making policies explicit (this article), (3) an article about the applied Kanban metrics, and (4) an article about the lessons learned in our blog service team.
Our blogger service board
The board is to a common overview of the different work item types by brainstorming for our blog service, e.g.:
- blog article
- medium.com article
- new author profile
- bug
Furthermore, it enables us to get a common understanding of which work item type will be mostly used and to create together associations of which work item types are connected to which columns in our Kanban system, see figure 1.
An example for our column policies is visualized in figure 2 — the WIP limits are visualized on the blue sticky notes. The column “Preparation for check by marketing experts” has a WIP limit of 1, the successor column “In quality check” has a WIP limit of 2. This column is described in more detail on the figure.
Our card design including classes of service and Lead Time calculation is shown in figure 3.
An example of further defined policies is shown in figure 4. This includes also the definition of a commitment point.
An example summary from one of our team retrospective results is shown in figures 5 and 6.
Conclusion and lookout
Making policies explicit was and is a comprehensive Kanban practice to foster our collaboration and improve our ability to manage the flow in case of our company-wide blog service. I strongly recommend this practice for every team and we will reflect in our cadence-based retrospectives on how we can visualize our policies better and better.
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 (this article), (3) an article about the applied Kanban metrics, and (4) an article about the lessons learned in our blog service team.
