Two months of Lean
It has been two months since we set on the Kanban journey. It is time to make a few observations.
First it is very hard to fight the urge of piling more work in our queues. We have too many ideas, many of them looking good enough that we would like to record them. It is a conscious effort to resist this and remind ourselves that, if these ideas are good they will either resurface coming from stake holders or we will remember them. If not, chances are we would not find them in a laundry list anyway.
Second it was enlightening to notice how small stories and short cycle time is energising. Short cycle times give an incredible impression of control over the process. They are also morale boosters as progress is continuous. Now this contrasts significantly with a longer story we played recently, which incidentally could have been broken down. That story gave the feeling of a squid, a temporary loss of control. Your vision becomes a tunnel, you lose peripheral vision and you hope that this will all end well. In the future we will proactively split stories and we will have to resolve the challenge of possibly breaking our WIP limit.
Third we got to experience how cycle and lead times are impacted when the bottleneck (me sadly) is loaded with additional work. We have this inconvenient position where we should reuse code that is in no shape to be reused and therefore needs to be cautiously refactored. That work cannot progress at the speed we move so we have to somewhat duplicate it while we work towards a good solution. Last month I had a green light to make one of the changes and did it. But this is additional work that has increased the lead time and cycle time without direct value to the project. In effect the project is working pro-bono for the rest of the firm. The positive about this is that the effect is immediately visible. In the future we will track this kind of work as issues.
Third, my coworker and subject matter expert was enlightened by Chris Matts’ cartoons. He did not use to understand how Agile in general and our own process in particular can be so efficient in the financial software industry. The Agile 2009 cartoon was an important stepping stone for his “conversion”.
How do you record ideas without piling them ? Do you have advice on how to handle external work ? How do you handle back-flow into limited size queues ?
