Handling ticket Issues With Kanban
David J Anderson’s book on Kanban shows us that a way to handle ticket issues is by attaching a color tag to a ticket to make it visible. An issue is ticket-related event that becomes an impediment to its value flow, such as a defect, insufficient definition, unresolved dependency, etc. What I encounter often is, people have natural tendency to move the ticket to where the dependency lyes. Although Kanban does not stop us from doing so, this might not be the best of actions. If, for example, in the images here the dependency is on Patient Checking it might be tempting to move the ticket to the Checkin column.
August 21, 2012
At a training session in Kitchener Waterloo, Canada. I was asked how to visualize and handle cycles in a Kanban board. The images below show a way to do it as a physical board and on an electronic board such as Swift Kanban. Tickets within a cycle move from left to right, from one column to the next until and cycle back as many times as necessary and once done they move to the Done column at the the end of the cycle. Note that columns inside the cycle can contain their own Done columns.
Organizations new to Kanban that have no experience with Agile usually find it easier to design their boards than those with Agile background because Kanban recommends the board to reflect the actual process rather than an abstraction. This is a good start. As we all know, a project’s behavior changes over time. This means the Kanban board should keep up with those changes, but unfortunately many Kanban organizations…
It is untrue that Kanban is only good for software change management work. Many people new to Kanban have this misconception mainly for two reasons. One is because Kanban started in a change management team at Microsoft. The other one is because David J Anderson declared that Kanban is a method for change management in the organization and that statement can be misinterpreted. What David meant with that is Kanban helps you bring positive change to your organization. Although the original Kanban description is around software it is actually context free.