
Ask HN: How do you use Kanban at work? - aalhour
How do you use Kanban? How do you prioritise items on a Kanban board? What is the criteria for items to make it to the board? How do you release finished tickets? How does your Kanban process fit with the team&#x27;s calendar in terms of frequency of releases, standups, meetings ... etc?
======
bonniemuffin
I know this isn't what you're asking, but I want to give a shout-out to
personal kanban. My husband and I use a post-it+whiteboard Kanban board at
home for household/personal tasks, and it revolutionized our life. We have
five categories: Backlog, To do, In progress, Blocked, and Done.

We jokingly do retros every couple weeks to clear everything off the Done
column and give each other feedback like "I really like how you insulated
those pipes, keep it up!" The retros are completely unnecessary (except for
fun), but the kanban board is life-changing: we don't have to nag each other
anymore, because you can just look at the board to see what's queued up to get
done. It completely eliminated a lot of unnecessary friction between us.

~~~
kungtotte
Me and my wife are trying for something like this, but we're using Notion.so
instead of post-its since we already use it for a bunch of other stuff. It's
lightweight and the Android client is pretty good.

~~~
nekgrim
Notion.so looks great, thanks for the discovery!

------
tdingman
If you use Asana, or are thinking of using it, the Board view allows you to
implement Kanban. Asana use was pretty low before I started at my job, but
once I introduced Board view + Kanban, adoption increased significantly.

A couple specific tips:

* Use a backlog/ideas/to do eventually column to store tasks whose time has not come. It's a great place to brain dump * Make tasks bite-sized with actionable titles. More tasks completed = more dopamine hits = higher adoption = better tracking * Review open tasks with your direct reports regularly. I do 1x/week

------
nerdwaller
We have 4 columns:

* Proposed * ToDo * In Progress * Done

As a developer we mostly care about all but the first (though we drop random
stuff in the first). The ToDo is always ordered with respect to priority but
is generally irrelevant while one has work in-flight. That allows us to,
without having to really notice, always grab the most important thing when we
are free again.

As you can imagine the proposed is the ungroomed/vague/random idea list that
is roughly ordered toward whatever the PO (or developers for us since we don’t
have product) views as a road map - discussed every week or so.

Everything has labels and generally ties to the concept of an epic or bug.

~~~
klenwell
We organize our columns in Trello around our scrum process. Our Proposed
column is called the Wish Heap. It's where stories go before they're groomed
(titled as user story, acceptance criteria defined, sized) and added to the
Backlog column (or To Do) ready for work.

First rule I try to get everyone in the org to follow: all work done by devs
has a card. A dev gets approached by a manager who just needs one quick thing
done, shouldn't take more than 5 minutes: "That's great. Can you throw it on
the Wish Heap or talk to the scrum master?"

~~~
alexchamberlain
Whilst I agree in general, but depending on your internal clientele, I think
it can be useful having someone dealing with those 5 minute jobs - if you can
save someone a couple of hours work by writing an SQL query for them, you
should. It'll improve your relationship with other teams.

------
stonewhite
It totally depends on the team and work. We apply Scrum or Kanban separately.
For example Ops team almost exclusively executes Kanban method, yet Dev teams
probably use Scrum.

For the columns on Jira: we have 4 - 5 columns; Backlog - To Do - In Progress
- Blocked - Testing(sometimes) - Done. I do believe this is more than plenty,
although in some customers I have consulted to might have ~10 columns which
some of them reads like code review, test on staging, test on prod.

Ticket scoping is the most important thing if you want to execute a
Kanban/Scrum method. It shouldn't be too broad (i.e. fix all the bugs) or it
shouldn't be too focused (i.e. write tests for this function). Each
story/ticket must be an independent deployable feature or function written
with a business level understanding with clear acceptance criteria. _Clear
acceptance criteria in bullet point form is very important!_ (repeated for
emphasis)

Backlog is prioritized by business value and urgency, and transferred to the
To Do column by a business/product owner or a PM to make sure no one is
ticket-starved.

Depending on your work or infrastructure capability, you can release each
ticket as a separate deployment or you can create weekly or bi-weekly release
packages that are well tested on a staging environment. Any code change that
has stayed unreleased more than 2 weeks probably needs a fresh look.

------
PeOe
We use Kanban for several departments because our Tool Zenkit is not only a
Kanban Board. You can work with multiple data views, for example, a Calendar.
In Marketing, we use it for task management. Prioritization can be used via
due dates, the order of the items or by setting labels with "high", "medium"
or "low". We add almost everything to the board to have a good overview of the
workload or we add checklists to an item where we can see what to do within
this task.

Everyone can move his items to "Done" and I get informed or we use the column
"need confirmation" to check if the task is all done. And with the Calendar
view, a team calendar isn´t a problem anymore.

More Infos about Zenkit: [https://zenkit.com](https://zenkit.com)

------
jimnotgym
At the risk of....

We use it to work out when inventory needs moving and re-ordering...

I know it means 'coloured badge' so I can see why it could describe post-it
notes, but since it is so well understood to mean 'when inventory levels get
to the (usually virtual) coloured badge, trigger a re-plenishment,' in the
Toyota manufacturing method I still (as a multidisciplinary person) find its
use in PM really annoying. Especially as the Toyota method is so ubiquitous in
inventory control. Two entirely different uses for the same esoteric word.

I use Trello by the way, but I much prefer the real post-it board if your team
is in one place. Todo》Doing》Done for me. For certain workflows a QA stage is
helpful

------
laoba
We use Github’s projects AKA kanban. It’s nice to tie in directly to the
repository features sure as milestones, labels, pull requests, issues, etc.

We have a board per platform. All boards have the same 5 columns:

Backlog - not in current sprint but can be added if spent complete Current
Sprint - can be picked up by anyone if not assigned In progress - someone
working on it Testing - Completed issues / pull requests that get assigned to
a coworker to review Done - once reviewed moved here

------
calmchaos
If you need a personal Kanban tool that integrates with Google Tasks & GMail,
check out Kanbanly:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kanbanly/oinopeelp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kanbanly/oinopeelpidbddmdhhllmpifaohjdkom)

------
atzero
Our team uses Kanban just as a way to keep track of all the tasks we have and
see what anyone of us is working at a given time. It's then up to the project
manager to distill that info and distribute it to whoever needs to know. As a
developer, I don't do anything but switch what I'm working on

~~~
conradfr
What I would give to have exactly this instead of all the scrum nonsense.

------
techaddict009
We use different Trello Boards for different projects.

We use it in very minimalistic way:

3 Lists - To Do, Doing, Done.

I manage projects so I add tickets and tag the person who has to do it.

If needed I add due date.

I put a watch on 'Done' list and once something is there I review it out.

------
sngz
anyone know a decent replacement for trello now that atlassian has bought them

------
brian_herman
We dont. I wish we did.

~~~
webwanderings
Same here.

In my opinion, kanban tool should have taken off in popular usage, instead of
tools like Slack.

If one is in a big org and using tools like Slack, you're most likely looking
at yourself as a gigantic mess.

Kanban methodology in potential gives a better canopy style hierarchy to break
out big into small chunks. I say potential because ultimately, none of this
matters if there's no proper delegation and care at the top (let too many
people create slack or groups or whatever, you're looking at chaos down the
road).

~~~
alexchamberlain
I don't think Slack is replacing proper project management; it's a tool for
impromptu communication and help.

~~~
webwanderings
Yes, but what purpose does any work-related communication serve? The
communication almost always is (and should be) around the tasks, activities,
projects etc. Tools like Slack do not provide hierarchy and organization.
Tools like kanban on the other hand, do.

~~~
jarfil
* Slack is for general conversations.

* Kanban is for task management.

* Wiki pages are for knowledge storage.

* Mind maps are for topic organization.

You pretty much can use any of these tools to do any of the others' jobs, but
each one is best at its own kind.

