Up and Out Kanban

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

  Agile   Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

After showing how Kanban is applied to small projects and larger-scale initiatives up to three months in duration, our series concludes with a detailed look at the challenges and benefits of bringing Kanban to longer projects in multi-team environments. It starts with enabling a shared understanding of reality.

This is the fourth and final article in our exclusive series about applying a Kanban framework to projects and portfolios. In the previous installment — “Scaling Kanban” — we showed how the core concepts can be extended to longer projects up to three months in duration.

Larger projects are generally characterized by extended durations and multiple releases, collaborated on by several interacting teams. As the scales of projects grow, the patterns seen in smaller efforts continue.  Each sub-team will manage its work using the approaches described in the first three articles of the series, while maintaining appropriate attention to commitments with dependent teams. The overall effort is managed using program and portfolio management techniques with an eye towards validating successful mitigation of risk at each dependency point through early and frequent delivery of the boundary objects (be they software or otherwise).

Proper attention by each team enables the high-trust relationships that allow the project to flow and visibility to…

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