Kanban Workbook

A Practical Guide to using Kanban

Karen Greaves and Samantha Laing

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/kanbanworkbook

This version was published on 2016-11-29

2016 Growing Agile

Contents

Foreword by Melissa Perri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

I Visualise Your Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Growing Gardens: Visualise the Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2. Visualisation Tips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

3. Growing Gardens: Using the Board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

4. Apply: Visualise your Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Personal Kanban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Growing Agile Online Courses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Growing Agile Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

About Growing Agile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Foreword by Melissa Perri
As a Product Manager, Im constantly figuring out the best way to keep my team motivated and
moving. I feel like I see a new tool on the market every day now that claims to keep track of your
work better or helps you prioritize. None of these have ever come close to being effective for all
areas of Product Management.
It wasnt until we ditched the fancy tools and went to a simple Kanban board that we found
success. Kanban is the only thing I have found that has allowed us to balance tasks for Discovery
items and Delivery items. We have more insight into our process, and the team feels empowered
to make decisions on their own.
If youre a Product Manager, I would highly suggest reading this book. Its a great introduction
to the Kanban methodology and it will help you get moving immediately. Read each exercise, do
them, and improve your process. Youll soon find your team working together like youve never
seen before.
Melissa Perri

i
About the Authors

Sam Laing (left) and Karen Greaves (right)

We are Sam Laing and Karen Greaves. With Type A personalities and a strong work ethic, we
have both done our share of overtime on death march projects. Eventually we knew we had to
find another way. Agile brought us together when we worked at a company trying to do Scrum
for the first time.
In 2012, we took the plunge and started our own business, Growing Agile. Since then we have
been doing the work that we are passionate about - introducing and improving agile. Best of all
we have a positive impact on other peoples lives.
One of the things we have gotten really good at since starting our own business is getting stuff
done effectively and efficiently. Having been workaholics before, we vowed we would never
work overtime now that we worked for ourselves. We chose lifestyle over work and we now
only work 4 days a week.
How did we achieve this? Some simple steps like making our work visible, regularly making
priority decisions and saying NO to low value work, limiting work in progress and focussing on
getting things to DONE. The great news is you are now looking at a book that can help you do
the same. The principles we use, are all Kanban principles.
We learn best by doing, so as with many of our other books, this is a workbook to help you start
using Kanban with your team. Good luck and enjoy the journey. Wed love to hear from you via
email info@growingagile.co.za or Twitter @GrowingAgile.
Enjoy!
http://www.growingagile.co.za
mailto:info@growingagile.co.za
https://twitter.com/GrowingAgile

ii
Introduction
Why this book
It seems that everywhere we go we encounter people with too much to do and not enough time.
We live in a world where we all have far more ideas than capacity to implement them. We think
this is a good problem to have, but it can be frustrating and depressing if you feel like you are
always context switching and can never get anything done.
This is why we love Kanban. Its a simple framework with just a few principles which can
radically change the way you work, both as an individual and as a team. We like the structure
and calm it brings to our work, and the satisfaction of moving tasks to done on a regular basis.
We believe everyone can benefit from Kanban. We wrote this book to make it easy for anyone
to give it a try. We hope it helps you get more done, focus on what is important, and enjoy work
just a little bit more.

Who is this book for

This book is for anyone looking to try Kanban. You might being using Kanban already and
wanting to get better, or you might know nothing about Kanban but are looking for a way to
focus on getting things done.
This is a book for those who learn best by doing, prefer pictures to words, and stories to theory.
Although the book does include words and theory, weve tried to keep it simple.
Join us as we follow the journey of a company called Growing Gardens, as they embark on a
project to write a gardening book using Kanban. We will see how their board evolves as they
embrace the principles of Kanban, and encounter problems along the way.
Well give you just enough theory to understand how and why the principles work, and then a
checklist to help you start your own board.
This works for any industry and team. After all we used Kanban to write this book (in a week)!
Although we learned much of the theory working with teams doing software development we
have used examples in this book that we hope anyone can relate to.

What is Kanban
Hmm, its a bit daunting writing this paragraph, there seem to be many almost religious beliefs
about what Kanban is, and even the differences between writing it with a lower case k or an
upper case K. We have no doubt someone will find this description wrong or offensive, but here
goes

iii
Introduction iv

To us, Kanban is a simple way to organise your work to help you focus on what matters: getting
things done and adding value, rather than what lots of people get caught up in, which is in being
busy.
Often when we teach people about Kanban we can be heard saying Kanban has between 3 and
6 principles depending on who you ask.
In this book weve decided to pick 5. The number (and way you group these ideas) is less
important to us that understanding how they can help you. So weve used the grouping that
makes most sense to us. Here are the principles we will use.

1. Visualise your work

2. Limit work in progress and enable pull
3. Manage flow
4. Make policies explicit
5. Improve collaboratively

We love reading books that teach us something but are written more like stories. Weve been
inspired by people like Ron Jeffries, with his Kate Oneal stories, and the Arbinger Institute books.
In this book we will tell you a story about a company called Growing Gardens. We purposefully
picked an example that is not related to software development so that this book is free of technical
jargon and can be used for any team.
Each section will focus on a single principle. The section will include a bit of a story and show
you how the Growing Gardens teams Kanban board develops over time. We will also include
some of the theory explaining the principles in a bit more detail. Finally each section will provide
you guidance on applying these principles in your own work. We highly recommend putting this
into action as soon as you read it.

How to use this book

We recommend reading one section at a time. Then implement that section, for at least a week.
Then read the next section, and implement your new learning.
We recommend only changing your board about once per week initially. Try not to change it
daily as you read the book, since it will be difficult to know what is working an what isnt if you
change it too frequently.
We recommend taking photos each time you change your board, this will help you track your
progress and learning. You should also regularly having a meeting to improve your board and
your process both while you are using this book, and on an on going basis to improve the way
you work, this is commonly referred to as a Retrospective.
If youve tried Kanban before and have a board you currently use, feel free to skip around to the
bits you need.
If you are super keen to get started right away, but dont have the full buy in of your team just
yet, you can get started with Personal Kanban. This is using Kanban just for yourself, and is
explained in the Appendix.
I Visualise Your Work
1. Growing Gardens: Visualise the
Work
Growing Gardens is a gardening company in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. It consists of
three people: Lisa, Emma and Juan. They have decided to write a short ebook on gardening to
help promote their company. The ebook will provide expert guidance to people who want to
create their own garden, but it will also let people know about the services Growing Gardens
offer and keep them top of mind should people need assistance.
For the first version of the book, they will focus on what you need to setup a vegetable garden,
since they have noticed more and more of their clients looking to do this. They have already
decided on what chapters the book will have, there are nine. They also have a friend Roxana,
who will do all the drawings they need, and client, Maryann, who has offered to edit the book
for them. Juan did some research and has convinced Lisa and Emma to use Kanban to help them
write the book.
Step 1 is to visualise their workflow on a physical board. They discussed this at length and
decided to break up the work into chapters, since it makes sense to work chapter by chapter.
Each chapter will go to Write, where one of them will write the chapter. After writing comes
Images, where they will pass the chapter on to Roxana, who will draw images needed for that
chapter. After Images comes Edit, where the chapter will go to Maryann for editing, and then
the chapter will be done. Once all chapters are done the book is complete! Voila!
Here is what their board looks like at the start:

2
2. Visualisation Tips
Make your Work Visible
The first principle in Kanban is to visualise your work. There are two key parts of visualising
your work. First, you must decide what your workflow steps are. In this example it is Write,
Images, and Edit. Second, you must decide how to break your work down into tasks that move
through your workflow. In this example, they are chapters.
There is no one way to do this, each team is different. What ever your process is currently write
it up. Be careful not to focus on what you wish your process is, rather describe what currently
happens. Dont overthink this, you just need a place to get started. You will soon notice if work
actually flows differently to what you think. Rather aim for broader process steps than being
too specific. It is much easier to add complexity later if you need it, than to simplify a complex
board.
When things are made visual it becomes easy to see where a problem is or when more work is
needed. A Kanban board is an information radiator. It constantly sends out messages of the state
of work: There too much in progress, and nothing is getting done., or The To Do list is empty,
people dont know what to work on next.

Physical versus Electronic Boards

Many people want to use an online tool for Kanban. We recommend starting with a physical
board. In the first few weeks, we dont want you to focus on learning how to use a tool. Instead,
we want you to touch and interact with your board as a physical entity. Get satisfaction from
moving a task to done. Notice when you look at the board and feel overwhelmed by all the
work in the To Do list. These emotions tell you a lot about your process, and are much easier to
experience with a physical board.
Your board will also evolve quite quickly in the first few weeks. It is much easier to change a
physical board to reflect your process, than it is to get a tool to do what you want it to do. Often
teams who adopt a tool first, simply adopt the default process specified by the tool, rather than
experimenting and finding a process and board design that works best for them.
You can use whiteboards, pin boards, or even walls and windows for your physical board. Here
are a few tips for each of the different types of physical boards.

Whiteboards
Magnetic whiteboards are great, you can use magnets to hold the tasks in place. Lots of people
use vinyl tape to create lines on their magnetic whiteboards. This is great until you decide to
change your columns. The tape ends up marking the boards. A simpler solution is to draw the
lines in a permanent marker, that way they wont get erased. When you want to move the lines,
simply trace over the permanent marker with a whiteboard pen, and magically it erases.

3
Visualisation Tips 4

Pin boards
A cheaper alternative to whiteboards is a pin board. Instead of magnet you can use pushpins. Try
get pins that are easy to push in and pull out. String works well to create lines on a pin board.
Task cards can get a little ragged around the pin holes. A bit of tape over the top where they get
pinned can solve this.

Walls and Windows

Masking tape is perfect to create lines, and you can stick stuff to the walls with Prestik or Blu-
tack. Sticky notes dont stick to walls well, although they stick fantastically to glass or paper.
Either use a window, or stick some flipchart paper on the wall and put sticky notes on that.

Red Dots
A great tip to notice which items are not progressing is to put a red dot on items that have
remained in the same column for more than one day. If tasks get two or more dots then you can
discuss what can be done to progress that task. The task might simply be too big. In this case try
breaking it down into separate tasks so that more people can work on it at the same time, to get
it moving. Remember the aim of Kanban is to get something from started to done as quickly as
possible.

Who is working on it
Notice in the example we havent yet said who will write each chapter. Some people create
tasks coloured coded by the person who will do the task. We prefer having an avatar magnet
or paper that you stick on the task when you start working on it. This drives team ownership
over individual ownership. Instead of thinking of a task as being Lisas task, everyone sees it as
a chapter than needs to be worked on. This encourages people to help each other out. If Lisa is
off sick it is also easy for Juan to pick up the task by sticking his avatar on it.

Task information
What information should be written on a task card? Some teams have one word, others have a
paragraph. Our advice is enough info to know what the card is about. If the task fell off the board,
everyone should know which task it was related to and be able to put it back in the right place.
Often tasks are related to tickets in an online tool, or a requirements document, or a particular
client. If so then it might be useful to include a reference number.
If you have a couple of pieces of information on a task card, its a good idea to have a key
somewhere on your board, so that people remember how to read the task cards.
As a minimum you should have the following information:
Visualisation Tips 5

Task description.
Start Date i.e. the date the task went into the To Do column.
End Date i.e. the date the task moved into the Done column.

These dates will help with measuring how long things take which we explain later.
Dont write too much information on the task card. These cards should serve as a place holder
for the work to be done, they are not a full description of the work. They should be easy to create
and maintain.
You might choose to colour code tasks that belong to a certain project or client or use different
colours for different types of work. You dont need to do this now, we will explain how to do
this in more detail in the section on Making Policies Explicit.
You could also use colour dots to indicate clients or project types. Dots are useful because they
are easy to change if you got it wrong, simply put a different coloured dot over it. If your task
card is in a particular colour you need to rewrite the entire card on a different colour card.
If you do use colours, its a good idea to have a key next to your board explaining what the
colours mean.
3. Growing Gardens: Using the Board
The Growing Gardens team liked the idea of avatars to know who was working on which chapter.
Lisa picked a heart, Emma picked a cat and Juan picked a star. They made the avatars out
of cardboard with their chosen icons on them, so they could stick them onto tasks they were
working on. They also decided to keep the info on the cards very simple: the chapter title and
the start date.

Their board was created on a piece of paper, with lines drawn using thick markers. They stuck
the board on the office wall, near their desks. Lisa bought index cards and Prestik(Blu-tack) to
use for the task cards.
After a few days they realised the red dot system might help too. Juan had been busy on a chapter
and was out the office, so his chapter was standing still. Emma placed a red marker under their
board so that they could draw red dots each day on chapters that were not moving. This way
they would notice sooner if there was a problem and take action.

6
4. Apply: Visualise your Work
Are you as excited to get started as Growing Gardens was? We hope so. We suggest getting your
team and creating the board together. Remember this is just the first draft, it will change over
time, so dont worry to much about getting it perfect the first time.
Use these steps to guide you:

Define your workflow steps and create a column for each step.
Decide what information youd like to show on each task. Remember the minimum is:
description, start date, and end date.
Break your work down into tasks and create a task card with the above information for
each task. Include your work for the next week or two.
Decide what kind of board youd like to use and get the appropriate stationary.
Decide on the best place to keep the board so that it is easy for everyone to see during the
day.
Create avatars for each team member.
Have a red marker or red dots available at the board to indicate when a task gets stuck for
more than 1 day.
Create a legend or key for your board.

We recommend taking a photo of your board after youve done this. Its a great way to track how
the board changes over time and will be helpful for you to see how much you have progressed
by the time you get to the end of this workbook.
Start using the board and notice what happens over the next week. Here are some things to pay
attention to:

What happens when someone is off sick - did someone else pick up their task?
Which process step takes the most time?
Which step has the most tasks in it?
Does some work skip a particular column, maybe that step doesnt need to be part of your
workflow?
Are there some steps to your workflow that take time that you forgot about, maybe you
need a new column?
Is there information that would be helpful to include in your task cards?
Did drawing red dots on tasks help you break them down and get them moving again?

7
Appendix
Personal Kanban

Personal Kanban is a simple way to get more things done, based on principles from Lean
Manufacturing. It is a simplified version of Kanban which is commonly used to manage the
work of teams. Wed highly recommend trying Personal Kanban for yourself, before trying to
adopt Kanban for a whole team.

What you need

A board (paper, cardboard, whiteboard or even just a wall)
Sticky notes

How to do it
Write down all the things you need to do this week. Be sure to only write one item per
sticky note (we will call them tasks). Try to be as granular as possible, so think about items
being about an hour of work or less. If an item wont fit in an hour break it down into even
smaller tasks to make them doable within an hour.
Draw three columns on your board: To Do, In Progress, Done.
Place all of the tasks you wrote in the To Do column.
Prioritise the tasks in your To Do column, and shuffle them so that the top priority items
are at the top of the board and the lower priority items are lower down.
Move the highest priority task to In Progress, and start working on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing

9
Personal Kanban 10

If while you are busy with that task you realise you have new tasks, or get interrupted,
dont context switch. Rather write a new task for that item and put it in the to do list in
the appropriate place based on its priority.
When the task in your In Progress column is complete, move the sticky note to done.
You can now pick up a new task from to do. Dont pick up more than one task!

How to improve
The key to Kanban is minimising the amount of work you have in progress. This is usually done
by placing a Work In Progress (WIP) limit on the In Progress column. We highly recommend
keeping this limit to one for Personal Kanban, but if that is difficult start with a limit that seems
possible for you, and try to reduce it over time.
We recommend setting aside 30 minutes to reflect on how your process is working for you on
a regular basis (every week or two). Use this time to adapt your process and board. There are
many variations on the basic Kanban board described above. We recommend starting with the
basic board. Over time you might amend your board to for example, have a place for recurring
tasks that need to happen every day, or a waiting spot for items that cant progress without input
from others.
You can also collect metrics with Kanban. A simple one is the number of items done per day
or per week. Just count these on a regular basis. This will give you a good grasp of how many
tasks you can actually achieve in a day. This works best if tasks are roughly the same order of
magnitude (e.g. a few minutes to 30 minutes), rather than one task of 30 minutes and one task
of 3 weeks.

Who shared this with us

Personal Kanban was created by Jim Benson

Advanced Techniques
When a task needs to be done by a certain date, write that date on the sticky note. This will help
you easily see when this task should be done. Each day when you decide your priorities, take a
look at any dates on your tasks. If a deadline is approaching, prioritise that task higher so that it
can get done in time.
Every week, review your Done tasks. Look at the project or areas of work that the tasks fell
under. Is the balance appropriate? Are you focussing too much on one particular area or project?
To help with this you can use different coloured sticky notes for each project or area. Also look
at if the tasks you completed were urgent or important? In hindsight, would you have completed
the tasks in a different order? Answering these questions will help you to prioritise better in the
future.
Thanks for the advanced techniques Sandy Mamoli!
http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/jim-benson/
https://twitter.com/smamol
Growing Agile Online Courses
We offer several online courses aimed at Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Agile Teams.
If you are ready to get a taste of what our online courses are about sign up for our FREE five
week Scrum Master or Product Owner email course.
Our online courses are a little different to regular online video courses. Weve applied the
principles of Training From The Back of The Room to our online materials. That means each
course comes with a workbook and exercises for you to do, as well as videos to watch and
techniques that you can use with your teams. Each activity is intended to deepen your knowledge
of an area, so we suggest doing the course over a few weeks and taking the time to do all the
exercises.
Take a look at our offerings here http://www.growingagile.co.za/online-courses/.
http://www.growingagile.co.za/new-sm-email-course/
http://www.growingagile.co.za/new-po-email-course/
http://www.growingagile.co.za/online-courses/

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Growing Agile Books
Scrum Master Workbook - 15 Weeks of Accelerated
Learning

Essential for new Scrum Masters! This is a workbook you print out and fill in each week. It will
guide you through a range of topics that are critical for Scrum Masters to understand. Each week
will include reading, exercises and a journal page for you to reflect. We also include cutouts for
your toolbox on a range of different topics.
Scrum Master Workbook is available on Leanpub.

The Growing Agile Coachs Guide Series

This series provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics.
The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves
needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans,
slides, workbooks and activity instructions to run a number of workshops on each topic. The
interactive workshops are all created using techniques from Training from the Back of the Room,
to ensure participants are engaged and remember their learnings after the workshop.
The series is available in a bundle on Leanpub, or you can purchase the books individually.
https://leanpub.com/ScrumMasterWorkbook1
https://leanpub.com/b/coachsguide

12
Growing Agile Books 13

Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Training Scrum

We have been training teams in Scrum for about three years. During this time we have spent
many hours preparing training plans and creating workbooks, flipcharts and slides. This book
will help you plan and deliver interactive, fun Scrum training for anything from a short workshop
on a particular topic to a full two-day course.
Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Training Scrum is available on Leanpub.

A Coachs Guide to Agile Requirements

Our requirement workshops are aimed at different stakeholders ranging from business, to
Product Owners and teams. This book is a collection of some of those workshop and can be
used to help improve the way you think about and communicate agile requirements.
Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Agile Requirements is available on Leanpub.
https://leanpub.com/TrainingScrum
https://leanpub.com/AgileRequirements
Growing Agile Books 14

Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Mastering Backlogs

Often Product Owners cant see the forest for the trees and there are so many items in their
backlog and not enough hours in the day to groom it. We run short workshops where we work
with the Product Owners actual backlog. The workshop is a working session, and an hour later
the Product Owners emerge with an improved backlog.
Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Mastering Backlogs is available on Leanpub.

Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Release Planning

We often hear people say Were agile, we dont need a plan! or even worse We cant plan.
This is just not true. We run Release Planning workshops with many organisations. This book is a
collection of our workshops that will help you run similar workshops to create agile release plans.
We include teaching points on a range of techniques like Story Mapping and release burnups to
help you explain to others how to use these methods effectively.
Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Release Planning is available on Leanpub.

A Coachs Guide to Agile Testing

If a team believes they are agile, but nothing has changed about the way they test, then there
is still much to learn. We teach 5 key principles that explain why agile testing is fundamentally
different to traditional testing.This books includes a collection of workshops to help teams grasp
these principles and adopt an agile testing mindset. Its not just for testers. A key part of agile
testing is that the whole team is involved, so we always run these workshops with everyone in
the team.
Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Agile Testing is available on Leanpub.

Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Facilitation

Its taken us several years to master the skill of facilitation, and it continues to amaze us how
few people learn the skill, or even understand what it means. People spend much of their lives
in meetings, and yet so many meetings lack facilitation. We hope the collection of tips and
techniques in this book will inspire you to grow your own facilitation skills and improve the
meetings in your organisation.
Growing Agile: A Coachs Guide to Facilitation is available on Leanpub.
https://leanpub.com/MasteringBacklogs
https://leanpub.com/ReleasePlanning
https://leanpub.com/AgileTesting
https://leanpub.com/Facilitation
Growing Agile Books 15

Other books by Growing Agile

Flow
Do you have a never-ending to do list and not enough hours in the day? Imagine getting
everything on your to do list done without stress or worrying. Imagine being twice as productive
in half the time.
We have over 30 proven tips and techniques to help you achieve a state of flow, where time stands
still and productivity soars. With these tips you will deliver value to your customers sooner in
practical and simple ways. You will also be happier and less stressed.
Flow is available on Leanpub.

Collaboration Games
Add an element of fun to your meetings or workshops using these 12 short games that teach
principles of collaboration.
Collaboration Games is available on Leanpub.

Who is Agile in South Africa

This book is based on the original Who Is Agile book, only this is a regional version for South
Africa. Its a collection of interviews with passionate South African agilists.
Who is Agile in South Africa is available on Leanpub.
https://leanpub.com/helpworktoflow
https://leanpub.com/CollaborationGamesToolbox
https://leanpub.com/WhoisagileSouthAfrica
About Growing Agile

At Growing Agile we help companies create great teams that create exceptional products. We
are agile coaches passionate about helping you get the results you are looking for.
We are based in Cape Town South Africa, but work with clients from all over the world. We
provide phone based individual or group coaching sessions, as well as online courses for Scrum
Masters, Product Owners and Teams.
Find out more about us at www.growingagile.co.za.
Our personal goal is to help influence a million people on their path to becoming agile coaches.
Our books and videos are ways we can spread that influence further than what we can in person.
We are exploring new ways to do this.

One of our latest projects is AgilePath.me. A community resource of links, courses, books,
and ideas to help you find your own learning path as an agile coach.
We also have RemoteAgileCoach.com to help all those people who have remote team
members and would like some tips and assistance.

If youd like to stay in touch and hear about our new ventures, please sign up to our monthly
newsletter.

http://www.growingagile.co.za
http://www.AgilePath.me
http://www.remoteagilecoach.com/
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