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Kanban. The team I work on with exception of priority tasks that need to be handled by particular developers through manual assignment (which is often rare), w

Kanban. The team I work on with exception of priority tasks that need to be handled by particular developers through manual assignment (which is often rare), we use Jira and Kanban methodology. Developers get to pick their own cards to work on. A developer is only allowed to work on one card at a time. This allows a problem to have 100% focus by a developer. We follow the strict rule: nobody is allowed to assign a card directly to a developer. Nobody is allowed to side-step work in and go and ask a developer to do something (especially if they are working on something else). All work goes through a process. We have a priority column. The product team is only allowed to add a maximum of 3 priority cards to be picked by developers. We stick to this pretty strictly. The key to something like this is implementing rules and abiding by them. The biggest issue for me back in my agency days was the fact you would be expected to do many things at once and given such little time. Multitasking in a high pressure environment with a deadline looming and all of this work piled onto you means you make tonnes of mistakes. Not to mention people walking up to you and asking you to do things (mostly designers). Picking your own task is beautiful in that you know what needs to be done, you don't have to worry about anything else except that one task. Having strict channels and a loose process for developers to self-select their own work actually works really well. And in my experience with my current team, it works incredibly well even within a somewhat large organisation spread out over various time zones from Australia, to India, the UK and the US (both coasts). The less hands on you are with an experienced development team in most cases, the better it will thrive.

lttlrck 12y ago
Is this really Kanban? How is it different to a team working through issues in Jira?
alasdair_ 12y ago
Out of interest, what does a developer do if they are hard blocked on an item? Can they work on a second task?
NeutronBoy 12y ago
How do you ensure that the cards marked Priority are actually worked on as a priority?
- nostrademons 12y ago
  (Never worked on a Kanban team per se, but I worked on several teams at Google that used this system under different names.) You don't. However, you incentivize people who work on the gritty, hard-to-do, high-priority problems. Come promotion time these are usually the people that get promoted, and get their pick of further projects. The reason this system works is that it implicitly trusts your developers. Most developers don't deliberately want to work on stuff that is useless and nobody cares about. However, they often don't know what the priority tasks are, or management's judgment of a high-priority task is actually blocked by some other seemingly low-priority task, or they're afraid of spending lots of time on something that other people won't recognize as important. By getting a written record of which tasks were judged to be important by the team and who did them, many of these fears are alleviated.

lttlrck 12y ago

Is this really Kanban? How is it different to a team working through issues in Jira?

alasdair_ 12y ago

Out of interest, what does a developer do if they are hard blocked on an item? Can they work on a second task?

NeutronBoy 12y ago

How do you ensure that the cards marked Priority are actually worked on as a priority?

nostrademons 12y ago
(Never worked on a Kanban team per se, but I worked on several teams at Google that used this system under different names.) You don't. However, you incentivize people who work on the gritty, hard-to-do, high-priority problems. Come promotion time these are usually the people that get promoted, and get their pick of further projects. The reason this system works is that it implicitly trusts your developers. Most developers don't deliberately want to work on stuff that is useless and nobody cares about. However, they often don't know what the priority tasks are, or management's judgment of a high-priority task is actually blocked by some other seemingly low-priority task, or they're afraid of spending lots of time on something that other people won't recognize as important. By getting a written record of which tasks were judged to be important by the team and who did them, many of these fears are alleviated.