Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Kanban At Yahoo!

Here are the links to the presentation I gave at Yahoo! in the fall of 2007.

Part 1 (1 hour), Part 2 (1 hour) Technorati tag: Lean, Kanban, QCon, InfoQ, David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, Agile, Project+Management

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Purging the Kanban Backlog

One of the PM’s in our office calls it a “clean out.” From time to time you should purge your kanban backlog to keep it fresh and relevant. The backlog is either a set of requirements for a project or program or a set of change requests for a sustaining engineering effort. There will always be new backlog incoming as the business changes and people have new ideas. Depending on this incoming rate compared to throughput of software delivery, the backlog may be growing, or at least not falling. A significant backlog is a problem. It affects your agility because things spend time queuing and that queue time is waste. Meanwhile, the request or requirement my be atrophying in relevance or ability to generate revenue as a differentiator.

Purging the backlog is similar to a bug triage effort. You simply need some criteria to decide whether something stays in the backlog or is dropped. It could be very simple. For example, “anything over 6 months old is dropped.” This simple rule fits with the real option theory nature of kanban pull prioritization. If something isn’t important enough to get selected over a 6 month period, it probably isn’t important enough - period!

Naturally, a more complex set of criteria is possible. You might want to assess the alignment with strategic, operational and tactical objectives of the business. You might want to assess alignment with particular customer segments or even specific customer orders. As we do, you might want to consider whether a change request is obviated with a forthcoming major release, or is requested on a system due to be decommissioned at some known point in the future.

Regardless, of your criteria, I’d recommend that you purge your backlog regularly, at least quarterly and perhaps monthly. Keeping the backlog healthy and relevant serves the business by simplifying prioritization discussions for kanban slots and by reducing queuing time and improving overall business agility from ideation to delivery of working software.

Related Posts: Kanban in Action, Recipe for Success Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management