Kanban for Software Development « Thoughts on Collaborative Planning

22nd March 2010 16:10:54 by Richard Bennett

http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/kanban-for-software-development/

"You break the work process in a series different activities (phases).  You then set a limit of how many job units you will allow at any phase.  A simple rule of thumb: you can have a few more work units as you have people doing that job, so that each has one thing to work on at a time, and a small cache of completed jobs.  The people in a given phase will do their work on a job unit to completion, so that it is ready for the next phase of work.

"This is where the somewhat brilliant key idea behind KSDM comes to play.  The completed job does NOT free the person for working on another job, until that job is pulled into the following phase and work is started there.  If work is piling up at a particular phase, those people are NOT ALLOWED to work ahead.  As Taiichi Ohno makes so clear, that working ahead is waste.  Instead of working ahead, they can look around to see what is wrong."