[TipsForCanoes]

The fundamental idea behind Kanban was WIP Constraint Management.

Unfortunately, so many people have been doing cargo-cult agile for so long that now the word "kanban" means 'task board with columns' to most people.

It should not be possible to put 200 items into a column on a Kanban board unless the team is actually shown to have the capacity to work on them without causing a bottleneck.

[somat]

The fundamental idea behind Kanban is backpressure signaling for logistics.

If I understand it correctly it moves the signaling in-band so it can be handled at a locally distributed level, that is, each local parts consuming system is responsible for directly signaling it's upstream supplier to provide more parts and this is done by putting the signals on the parts bins or making the parts bins themself the signals.

I guess there is also that weird software logistics thing that appropriated the kanban term but because software logistics is very different from manufacturing logistics has little to do with actual kanban. shrugs. It's probably still a backpressure signaling thing however.

[okovooo]

"WIP" does not work - it only seems that you are in control of the process. It may work for the same type of tasks (hammering a nail), but in my practice, where all tasks are different, it did not work anywhere.

[wpietri]

It has worked fine for me on a variety of software projects for more than 20 years. Here's a project I documented back in 2004, where we used physical cards: https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/

These days I'm on an all-remote team, and we use GitHub's kanban interface with WIP limits. That also works fine, and them main difference form how I worked back then is that we no longer do estimates.

I'm not sure what went wrong for you, but my strong suggestion is not to think of it as a task board. Think of it as a board that lists units of value. E.g., features delivered, research completed, messes cleaned up. We do sometimes make task breakdowns for cards, but that happens as we start work on the card, and it's just a checklist somewhere (for us currently, in the GitHub issue via Markdown checklists).

An important mindset shift for a lot of teams to use kanban boards well is to get away from siloing and toward collaboration. For my teams, cards were generally not individual achievements, but things we collaborated on.

I think it's also important for software teams to have a BLOCKED column between TODO and WORKING. The only cards that should count against your WIP limit are the ones that people are truly working on that day. If there's something you can't work on for some external reason, move it to BLOCKED. Then before a card is taken from TODO, try getting any BLOCKED item going first. It's also worth talking in your retrospectives about common reasons things end up blocked, and I like to set a pretty low limit for blocked cards to force discussion.

Happy to discuss further, but kanban approaches definitely work well for software.

[okovooo]

I understand what you mean, but I think this is a self-deception of control. After thinking about it, I implemented WIP on the process (board), but only in the form of an "excess indicator".

[TipsForCanoes]

> "WIP" does not work

Such a bold statement when you must know that countless people have a very different experience. Kanban the team methodology is about process efficiency and avoiding bottlenecks.

WIP limits are triggers to redirect resources to the bottleneck is that causes the pileup. Example: If there is pileup of PRs needing review, that is the trigger for devs on the team to stop making new PRs and switch to doing reviews.

Kanban is certainly not the best methodology for all team tasks but where it fits it works very well.

Sadly, for a lot of teams "we are doing kanban" means nothing more than "we are using a task board with columns" or worse "we have no constraints or flow controls and do everything ad hoc."

[okovooo]

Yes, many people disagree with me. Take this as an assumption that I'm checking in my service. Of course, it is necessary to limit the amount of work, but in my opinion, WIP per column does not work. Therefore, I have implemented limits only for the entire kanban board (process).

[TipsForCanoes]

I'm curious exactly what you found not to work. How was your manager using the WIP constraints and triggers, that you didn't like?

I ask because in my experience the main 2 reasons are either a manager who doesn't understand the kanban methodology and uses it incorrectly or that it simply doesn't benefit the workload of the team trying to use it.

[okovooo]

In recent years, I've been working in 2-4 teams at the same time. Each team has its own manager, and every year one or two teams changed managers for different reasons. This gave me the opportunity to work with different people, but not a single case of successful introduction of WIP limits. It's not because someone didn't understand how to work with WIP. It just didn't have a permanent effect. For a change, it's worth trying different tools, I think it's useful for a good atmosphere in the team.

[TipsForCanoes]

Could you do me a favor and just explain what you found not to work?