Kanban and concurre...
 

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[Closed] Kanban and concurrent activities... Anyone?

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Hi chaps,

I'm a pretty experience Agile advocate, I've been using different Agile approaches and toolkits for about 12 years now.

Ive got a problem where I'm looking to represent a User Story that has more than one person doing multiple things on it at any one time.

So... Technical design and UX design may happen at the same time, or design could be in parallel to analysis.

What I want to capture is what bottle necks are occurring and then unblock them.

But I can't do that with just a single column for 'design' and then another for 'analysis'.

Anyone know of a good way to deal with this?

Cheers

Ricks


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 6:26 pm
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Im torn.

Is this an elaborate nigerian scam advert, a dating site advert or someone looking for ideas on how to build a titanium frame ?


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 6:28 pm
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It's how to deal with Broken Bronsons


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 6:34 pm
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I do this with sub-tasks on a user story. The story is the overall requirement,and I'll have subtasks for analysis, design, graphics, implementation, documentation, test, etc. Each on tied to the acceptance criteria for the story.

Subtasks can then be assigned to different people and have dependencies set up between them to show the bottlenecks and blockers.

I don't know if you're using any tooling, but this approach is supported by Jira and by Rational Team Concert.

<edit>

Although if the tasks are sequential I'll just pass the story on from one person to the next and have it gradually be completed.


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 6:43 pm
 tor5
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Subtasks as mentioned would be my vote. Also make sure your WIP limits are set appropriately - definitely not more than the number of people in the team - and keep any eye on cycle time and cumulative flow to spot bottlenecks. JIRA is working well for us with kanban.


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 7:34 pm
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Is this about the price of curtains?.


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 8:39 pm
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Is it Mornington Crescent Evo?


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 8:41 pm
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Is this what caused that sunset ?


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 8:44 pm
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I'll use subtasks in JIRA, that's a good call. Ran it through my demo project and looks like I can push that live easy, got a Kanban set up showing the progress of subtasks by user story, so looks easy.

I've also drawn up a physical Kanban that'll let me track start date, completion date for each story or epic. That way I can measure a huge amount of data amount individual cadence to flex WIP effectively.

Cheers chaps, 🙂


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 9:26 pm
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Simulation model, I'll sell you one 🙂


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 9:30 pm
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Sorry to respond late. Sub-tasks would be my call too.


 
Posted : 29/09/2015 9:49 pm
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I come here to get away from all this kind of nonsense ... ban hammer!


 
Posted : 30/09/2015 12:44 pm
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Coming from Operations floor point of view, and I am known for shooting out random things.

Swim lanes are good way (not too sure how you would present it, not knowing your world)
That way you could have multiple lanes showing the time line, and what processes are taking place.
When more than one thing (not nec a process) is happening at the same time, this could be a bottleneck for you.


 
Posted : 30/09/2015 2:14 pm
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2 ways of doing this

1. use sub-tasks

2. don't worry about it and encourage people to do the right thing to figure out and address the bottlenecks for themselves. Self organizing team and all that.

I prefer option 2.

Option 1 in Jira makes your board instantly look very confusing.

I find that people like option 1 if they are new to agile, or are used to a culture where they only do what their manager tells them.


 
Posted : 30/09/2015 2:27 pm