Information Radiators in Kanban
The Kanban method uses information radiators to keep information up-to-date and make it available to all interested parties at the time it is needed. Information radiators display information in a place where everyone has access and passersby do not need to ask a question; information simply hits them as they have a quick look.
The Kanban board is the most common information radiator used by the Kanban team. It can be a physical board or an electronic board, and the team can decide what will work best for them, after weighing the pros and cons of both. While electronic boards is helpful for teams that are not collocated and there are fewer chances of data loss with the facility of automatic calculation of metrics, physical boards a generally bigger and give teams a common place to gather. It is easier to set up and make changes to the board.
It’s important that the team that will be using the board, design the board. It creates a sense of ownership and increases the likelihood that they will honour the policies and processes they agree on. Remember to not think too much when designing the board. The board should reflect the current process and be prepared for changes as the understanding of the work increases and improvement opportunities become more obvious.
The Kanban board should reflect the actual workflow. Queues are added to the board, to manage handoffs. The queues give the team members visual signals that work is ready to start. Examples of queues are To Do, ready for development, development done, ready to test columns on the board. ‘Ready for’ columns are always for a known next step and are used for distinct handoffs. whereas done columns (like development done) are usually used when the next steps need to be identified or vary based on the work item. For example, after development is done, based on the work item, it is decided if it needs to go for UX review or testing.
A great way to remove any chance of misunderstandings and achieve consensus around the columns, queues, and workflow is to have explicit entry and exit criteria, that clearly define what criteria need to be met before we can move a work item from one column to another. It’s always good to revisit the entry and exit criteria, especially in stand ups or retrospectives, and see if we followed the criteria. Or is there anything we can add to the criteria to avoid an issue in the future?
Another information radiator is the work item card, which contains all the information the team needs to know how to work with it. Some of the information that is usually added to a work item card is description of work, who is working on it, status of the work item, deadline if applicable, is there a blocker, what type of work is it (bug, technical debt), size, and how the team felt about the work, while working on it from start to finish.
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