Agile Project Management with Kanban
Agile Project Management with Kanban: Over the years the agile project management’s methodology has given business managers a huge leverage in managing their projects. It has helped them manage large complex projects better by breaking it up into small manageable tasks.
When creating products it has also helped them to work closely with the customer as well. So for example through each product development iteration they can test the product with their target customers.
This will allow them to get valuable feedback. This information could then be used to modify the product and make it better for the next product development cycle. Despite the fact that the agile project management method has been so effective. It gets even better when you can integrate it with the Kanban tool.
What is Kanban?
Kanban means visual card or billboard. It was originally used by Toyota as a scheduling system for just-in-time processes.
The Kanban was used as a great tool to improve efficiency within the production system. The idea has now spread all over world and has been adapted for many different purposes. It has now been integrated into agile project management process to make it more effective.
The reason why it was necessary is simply because sometimes in certain projects incremental development and time iterations have challenges. Some of these problems include, the quality requirements of a product being created could get quite poor. This is simply because UX designers and product developers rush through the process in order to meet the deadline.
The agile project management process tends to get a bit unpredictable at times. As a result of this it’s hard to make certain plans for the upcoming future project. The other problem is that inside an iteration process, roles tends be uneven at times. This makes it hard to see the flow of the project.
The Kanban tool helps to visualize the flow of the progress of your agile development process. This ensures to track that everything is in order and everyone is working towards the same goal consistently. Also the Kanban board helps to drop the sprint process planning from short time iterations to focus on continuous flow within a project. Below you can see a great example of a Kanban board.
The layout of your Kanban board varies from project to project it all depends on your project goals. The above example as you can see have 5 columns. This is a typical example of one that is used to create a product feature. In the feature to develop column, you are going to list the different features you are going to create.
You then are going to list the different tasks you have to do in order to get the job done in the tasks in queue column. In the tasks in progress column you are going to list the task that you are currently doing.
You then are going to list the different task that you have completed in the tasks complete column. The last column is for features you have completed when you have finished with everything that needs to be done. You must also put dates on the sticky notes to calculate the cycle time. Putting the date of the day when you start a task and when it was finish is really important. It can help you to see how fast you get a certain task done. You can then analyze the information see if you can improve on it.
Evaluating your development process as you go along will help you ensure that everything is heading in the right direction. You can also use a process review session to identify the necessary changes that you need to make. In order for the overall project to be better is also important.
In summary using the Kanban tool helps the team to focus immensely on the sprint or iteration cycle time. This will help to bring transparency within the project by visualizing the entire sprint process to your team. It will also help to show the different tasks cycling through the framework from beginning to end. When you’ve implemented this with agile project management it just makes the whole project management process easier.