Effective Kanban and Standup Tips To Improve Team Communication and Alignment
This short blog describes some techniques to keep development squads productive focusing on the daily Standup ritual and the Kanban workflow. The advice given is applicable to both co-located and remote squads. However, for remote squads where communication and alignment are more challenging, it is even more imperative.
One of the key rituals for teams building products is the Standup. The standup is the ritual that occurs most often and on a daily basis. The Standup typically lasts no more than 15 minutes. It gives each contributor to the team (developer, designer, architect, product owner, etc.) the opportunity to discuss what they are working on and any blockers they may have.
The Kanban method is what agile teams use to manage the workflow of the team. Essentially the Kanban workflow manages the process of getting user stories prioritized all the way to being accepted by the product owner.
An effective Kanban workflow will lead to effective standups and keep the team aligned on the common goal which is to build the MVP.
Based on my experiences, some best practices for managing the Kanban workflow are:
- Keep the workflow as simple as possible
- Represent all stages needed to get stories accepted including any manual steps
- Keep the state of the user stories up to date
- Continuously optimize by automating any manual stages
The ‘In Progress’ column should represent stories that are currently being worked on. If there are 4 developer pairs on the squad there should be only 4 stories in the ‘In Progress’ column.
User stories that are blocked should be clearly marked as such and put back into the ‘Todo’ column.
Each role on the squad should know and understand which column represents work that they are responsible for. For example, if your product involves manually testing user stories or any manual deployment steps, there should be a stage in the kanban workflow for this. Note, I recommend to automate as much as possible, however in most projects I have been on there are still some manual processes and over time an effort should be made to improve the process and automate.
During the daily standup ritual, the squad members (devs, qa, architects, PO) discuss user stories that they are currently working on, recently completed and blocked. The Kanban board should make identifying and discussing these user stories very simple. When the standup ritual is performed remotely, it is important to display the board (physical screen when co-located or web conference for remote) for the entire team to see and understand what others are working on. Very often, unless attention is placed to keep the Kanban board organized and up to date, things becomes chaotic and the squad loses control of the state of each user story. The velocity of the team can potentially grind to a halt when this happens. When the team is remote, where communication and alignment become more challenging, it becomes even more important to keep the Kanban board as organized as possible.
An effective Kanban process will lead to effective Standups. The simple tips discussed in this blog will help improve overall team communication and alignment. This translates to happy developers, good team morale, high velocity and successfully completing the MVP. Good luck.
