This week we talked about preventing negligence and useful board design examples.
Preventing Negligence
- Each of us has experienced the “let’s add this other fix while the hood is up” situation.
- The author mentioned a circumstance where there were tickets piling up in the “validate” column/queue. She put in place a policy where all items that hadn’t been touched in 14 days would be considered done. The three of us wondered how that was okay to just mark that work is done. No testing?
- We talked about ways to manage the backlog to ensure work isn’t neglected. Sometimes you can do that in the middle of a sprint. Geoff recalled a colleague’s former employer having an “icebox” where user stories went if they got too stale. Jameson mentioned his former employer’s process of looking at oldest items first during backlog grooming.
- The older something is, the less context you remember about it.
- Regarding the 14-day closure policy from before, the author eventually lowered that to five days. She remarked that if she started at five, the policy likely would have failed. Start small, then tune.
- You need to make time for important, non-urgent work. For reference, see the Eisenhower matrix or Franklin Covey time management matrix.
- Houston noted that the concept of putting off a doctor visit (important, not urgent) may be cultural. Some people forgo medical checkups because they can be costly in the US.
- If you use Trello, there’s a card aging power-up to make your cards look older over time. This makes work visible in two ways: that it exists on a board, and the visual depiction shows its age.
- We all liked the idea of having a 10-minute (time-boxed) meeting to address old items in the backlog. Kill the zombies! The creator of the item may not be the one reviewing it, so the owner of this meeting would likely be the Product Owner.
Useful Board Designs
- We discussed the quotation from Richard Branson at the beginning of the chapter: “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.” There’s a double-edged sword with bringing on new changes. Too much too fast can lead to failure. From Jameson, “A smart man learns from his failures, a wise man learns from the failures of others.” Houston and Geoff added, “There’s being bold, and there’s being rash.”
- If you have “Done” and “Done-Done” on your board, you need better words for your states. There is only one “Done.”
- We skimmed the rest of the chapter, as it had examples of how to use Kanban boards in other ways: Plan/Do/Check/Act, managing your home, planning a move, dealing with repetitive tasks.