The Daily Kanban
The day-to-day status meeting done quick
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
I have always been a keen advocate for Kanban Methodology since I got lucky enough to speak with an experienced Agile Coach a few years back. I turned into a fanboy after the first successful implementation, especially when working in a context with years-old software. When I joined a team with a weak Scrum implementation and struggled to adapt, Kanban seemed a natural alternative. I didn’t know then how lucky I was to get to know the right coach at the right time. Immediately a Kanban framework was presented to the Team and a transformation was born.
One of the most challenging aspects of an Agile transformation, especially coming from weak methodologies, is the daily Kanban or the daily Stand-Up. This daily is greatly different from the Scrum because it goes around the board with different guidelines:
The team goes through the board from Top to Down, from Right to Left
Describe what advancements were made on each ticket
What is the progress expected for the day
If there are any blocking points or issues that need to be addressed
Running the clock and managing the stand-up
The first challenge was to keep the stand-ups short. My background back then came from waterfall-heavy teams used to weekly status meetings which took 1 hour if not more. Translating to Agile some colleagues thought they would ramble for 1 hour each day. It was a challenge to make it an average of 15 minutes or below. The reasons were plenty:
Some colleagues take 10 minutes to speak about the challenges related to a ticket just to show the team how difficult it is.
Others like to show off how they did A, B, and even D while discussing the future of W.
The existence of walking sleepers who were not paying attention, and once their name were spoken during the meeting they were lost on the board and asked which topic they needed to provide status.
The distracters brought topics not related to the ticket, and even out-of-work fun facts to engage in 5 min of useless conversation that went nowhere.
To avoid this mistakes the team needs to be informed about the format of the daily and is expected to run short and cover all the important points. With experience my strategy is to do it gradually: Even if a daily is taking 40 min, let’s try to reduce it to 30 minutes the next week and celebrate. Then move to 20 min during a week and celebrate the achievement. Finally set a time cap of 15 minutes. The idea is to gradually make the stand-up shorter.
For the sake of time, if a colleague takes 10 minutes to speak about a ticket, it’s easier and acceptable that you ask to keep it short. They might not be ill-hearted, they might even lack the notion of how long they take to explain.
Once I brought an Egg-shaped kitchen alarm clock to the meetings, and it was highly successful in creating awareness of how short the stand-up should be. It was a fun time-measure tool. We didn’t call the meeting short, it was there just to create a time awareness.
Rotating presentations
One way to keep the team engaged is to rotate the board presentation. This can be done in several ways: Volunteering, assigning a day to each person, randomly sorting a winner presenter, or any methodology that makes sense for your team. However, since the board will be presented by colleagues who are not very comfortable doing it, be mindful and tolerant of mistakes. Just correct casually or simply show by example.
Each person will have their way to present the Board and that is OK. The important part is to respect the norm of going through the board always in the same way: Preferably from top to bottom and right to left. I wrote preferably because one of my Teams didn’t like the standard way of Kanban. The topics were organized by swimlines, and then we presented going through each swimline. This worked very nicely and it stuck.
After several improvement iterations, the team became very quick no matter who was presenting the board. If you are new to Kanban, I would recommend that you make the first presentations and gradually let other people do it. Is important for you to understand the struggles and guide your colleagues through the presentation.
The blocking points
If someone is struggling on a ticket or a situation is impacting the advancement of a given project, the details of that particular situation are not discussed on the stand-up. Just organize a call or meeting just after the daily. Or even better, use it as an excuse to go faster on the daily if there are no more blocking or pending aspects. The use of Kanban is to reduce waste, and the main objective of the daily is to understand bottlenecks. If some bottleneck is evident, conclude the rest of the stand-up, free the team, and address what needs to be addressed urgently.
Another hint of where something is not quite good is when WIP (Work In Progress) limits are triggered. For me, the WIP should not be a blocking factor but an informative one. For example in code reviews, one of my teams used a formula to understand which value should have based on the team’s size. When the WIP was on red, it indicated that a lot of developers were pushing new code to code review but not taking any from the pile. This indicated a bottleneck on the code review part. Again, this was indicative and served as awareness. Once the WIP was red, some developers started pushing some code reviews forward and halted new replenishment since there was still pending work on the board.
Feel free to share your experience with Kanban meetings. Curious to know about your experience.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur