Scrum to Kanban (Lean)

We recently transitioned from Scrum to Kanban and I decided to come up with some practises that we should all stick to to make our Kanban experience as good as it can possibly be! Of course, these are initial goals and we can add, remove, amend these as nessesary.

I hope you find them useful; I'll attempt to update them as we do!

• Have the kanban board always visible to the team via a TV
• Have all open issues in the "To do” or “Open” column, but the team should take the time to prioritise them at the behest of the product owner
• Have a code review column as its often not clear when people would like things to be code reviewed, this prevents tickets piling up. Consider adding work-in-progress limits to these columns
• Have a testing column to be clear when QA/PO can pick things up (we work in a small team so adhoc manual testing in combination with automated tests is how we do things)
• At standup we review the board, our progress and make sure things are in the right column
• We make sure things are tagged correctly to help everyone understand the issues
• As Kanban is just in time focused, we can use standups to signal our dependencies when we need more work, designs etc
• Hold scheduled, cancellable sessions to plan more work and refine tickets with the developers

PS I'm really glad we moved to Kanban especially on such a small team (6), its afforded us much more time to work and less dedicated to ceremonies that didn't add any real value to the product. As more teams begin to move towards Lean project management I think we'll see Scrum go the way of waterfall, even if the big banks are only just starting their Scrum training 😁