Small Project Kanban

Eric Willeke is a generalist software practitioner with over 10 years of experience covering development, leadership, coaching, training and consulting roles.

  Agile   ProjectsAtWork  

Context matters when applying a Kanban approach to your projects. In the second installment of our series, we look at the interplay of four Kanban tenets — visibility, flow, variability and improvement — when leading smaller projects with shorter durations.

This is the second article in an ongoing series about applying a Kanban framework to projects and portfolios.

The application of a Kanban mindset to any project changes depending on the project’s context. Small projects need to be treated differently than large projects. Some projects like medical devices and aerospace applications put people’s lives at risk and should apply high-assurance approaches, while others are exploring developing markets and need to throw many things against a wall to see what sticks. Some are working in well-understood, low-variability environments, while others are exploring emerging technologies. Each project has a unique shape and color of its own, which requires different approaches and situational nuance in the project management approach. At the same time, however, many projects are broadly similar, and can be categorized in a way that provides some initial guidance on overall approach.

This series continues by exploring how Kanban approaches apply when working with a small project of short duration, spanning from two days to two weeks. Future articles in this series will build upon…

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