Confusability

The Agility Diagram

 

Please watch Agile Is Dead (Dave Thomas) and Jabe Bloom (Whole Work: Sociotechnicity & DevOps) to investigate these subjects in more detail.

Kanbandoned

kanbandoned

/'kanband(e)nd/

adjective

unresolved work which has been created as part of a Kanban system used in agile work practices which was created over one year ago but has not been updated in over six months

examples of usage:

"that work was kanbandoned when Dave left"
"we decided to move to the cloud and kanbandoned that work"
"I have got too much new work to do and cannot deal with my kanbandoned work"

When people start adopting Kanban it can take a long time to understand the need to limit "work in process". In stand up after stand up people explain why they weren't able to make progress on their work and will try to catch up later on. After a few months you will see physicals boards that have been abandoned because the promise of an efficient flow of work failed to materialise. People will either drift back to their old way of working or they will start a new board somewhere else and try again.

If you use a software Kanban solution such as Jira then it can be difficult to see the "kanbandoned" work because the boards are not constrained by physical size. But it is very easy to assemble a dashboard that visualises the  "kanbandoned" work by using a query like "resolved is EMPTY AND createdDate < -52w AND updatedDate < -26w".

When I ran this query I found that just under 9% of unresolved work fell into the "kanbandoned" category (created over a year ago and not updated for six months).

I then published a dashboard that listed every assignee and project that contained these items and also added a "kanbandoned" filter to the kanban board that had been set up for individuals to manage their work.

This started discussions about why work was being kanbandoned and the common themes were:

• too much work being assigned
• pointless work being created
• lack of discipline around managing work
• no "work in process" limits at a personal or organisational level
• assigning work to the wrong people - this included unresolved work being assigned to people who had left the organisation

We will continue to monitor and highlight our "kanbandoned" work, not in an attempt to put pressure on people to do more, but in order to give people permission to let go of the long tail of "kanbandoned" work and also to say no to new work that is outside of a WIP limit.