Kanban With Changing Workflow

 

My teams and I do Kanban within a waterfall program.

This means that we have release cycles that start out with some investigation and detailed planning, move into true development, and then we have an Integration & Test process at the end of each release to go through.

A struggle we've had is that our value stream changes each time we transition from one phase of the waterfall cycle to another.

Furthermore, when in the Integration & Test phase, there is a specific tool we a required to use to work off what we call Test Descrepancy Reports (TDRs) which are basically bugs we find in testing.

At first, we would use a separate kanban board for the I&T phase, which maps the value stream of that process. However, due to the requirement of using a specific tool, it became a wasteful process to try and use both.  We had to keep both updated.

So in those cases, we dropped the kanban board - everything else was the same, but the visualization and mapping of a value stream went away for that portion of our work.

Has anyone else ran into a similar experience, with Kanban or something else, where a tool made a difference in terms of how you could work as a team?