The end is in sight – this the 20th excerpt from my 23-chapter book. This week, two excerpts for the price of one!
This chapter looks at three different approaches to modeling the workflow that our kanban system is going to support:
- Sketching it out
- Top-down decomposition
- Bottom-up organization
It’s important to remember that the result that we’re working toward is a working kanban system, not a static model. It’s best not to get too attached to the products of this exercise—they will quickly lose their value once the system begins to evolve.
I’ll keep this simple by assuming that there is just one main workflow involved. If you have more than one, you can take each workflow in turn or use one as the baseline by which the others are described.
Review
Before we move on, here are some good ways to check and improve what you have so far:
- Quickly combine approaches to validate your model, such as:
- Produce a sketch from your top-down or bottom-up model.
- Make sure that actual work items map to your sketch or top-down model, then use the “what does this item need?” questions.
- Consider whether it would be helpful to group, consolidate, or break down categories.
- Check that queues are adequately represented and that you know where your commitment points belong.
- Look to see where the dissatisfactions and frustrations discussed in Chapter 18 might originate.
- Identify the kinds of knowledge discovery associated with each active state.
- Seek to de-emphasize functional organization.
- Present it to other people.
None of this should take long. Remember, sketchy!
Next up: 21. Discover classes of service. Previously: 19. Analyze demand and capability. Start from the beginning: 1. Transparency.
My book Kanban from the Inside was published in September 2014 by Blue Hole Press, publishers of David Anderson’s Kanban book, aka the “blue book”. Complete with an awesome foreword by Luke Hohmann, it is available in paperback and now on Kindle onamazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de and amazon.fr and (no doubt) other amazons also. A PDF e-book is also available via the djaa.com store.
