Everyone is a project manager. Whether you’re managing the development of a new application and growing your startup, working on a new billion-dollar enterprise project, or just trying to liven up your yard with some DIY landscaping, you’re always managing a project.
The success of your project depends on many factors, but one of the most common reasons projects fail is a lack of management or outright bad project management. No matter how small your team is, or how clearly your requirements are documented, if you do not manage your team properly, your project is bound to fail.
Every minute you spend managing your project is time well spent. It will bring you closer to the successful completion of your project.
Agile project management is a widely accepted method of approaching modern software development projects. But what does
Agile really mean?
Agile projects accept the frequent change of scope and requirements as an integral part of the process.
In this post, we will explain the basics of agile project management with Kanban.
Even if you are an experienced project manager that understands agile principles in and out, you should refresh your memory and remind yourself on core concepts. Innovation cycles in software development are constantly speeding up, making project management more complex with each iteration. Going back to fundamental principles and solidifying core principles of Agile is always important. After all, repetition is the mother of all knowledge.
Kanban is one of the easiest methods of managing any Agile software development project. You can easily handle a local development team that works from the same office or distributed team, spread out through several time zones.
Kanban is not a process. It’s a way to manage any process with minimal changes to the team’s established operational activities.
In order to apply Kanban principles to your work, you must apply two simple rules:
- Visualize your process.
- Limit work in progress.
Visualize Your Process
Data visualization is a quick, easy way to convey information in a universal and easy to understand manner. When looking at pictures, the human brain can process several pieces of information simultaneously. Some researches say that this can be up to 60,000 times faster than reading a text.
Brain neurons for our visual perception account for
30 percent of the brain’s gray matter.
The most popular way of visualizing a process is a Kanban Board. A Kanban Board is a board vertically divided into several columns, with each column representing one state in your process.
Let’s take a look at how a simple software development board would look. First, we need to define states for our development features:
- To-Do - feature is waiting for development
- Development - feature is assigned to a developer and he/she is working on it
- Quality Assurance - feature is in review
- Deployed - feature is accepted and included in application release
Based on this, your board should have the following layout:
Visualizing individual tasks is as easy as creating a simple card (much like a Post-it) that represents work that needs to be done. You can name the task, add the name of the assigned developer, due date, and any other relevant information to this card.
When you add that card to a column on the Kanban Board, you have visualized that, for example, a specific developer is working on a particular task that is due at a certain date and is currently in development.
Limit Work In Progress (WIP)
Human multitasking is a delusion. Instead of paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, our brains are switching between them very rapidly.
This is more visible in software development than anywhere else. Developers can work only on one piece of code at one time, and switching to another feature will cause delays and affect their concentration and performance.
This does not mean that you must limit the number of assignments to just one at the time. Development is complex and creative work, some tasks take more and other take less time to complete, and there is always a delay while a developer is waiting for something or someone. The important thing is to limit assigned tasks to a reasonable number that will not produce chaos (this is usually three to five assignments at a time).
Assuming that your development team is comprised of two developers and a QA engineer, your board might have the following WIP limits:
To-Do - Unlimited Development - Six-card limit (Two developers each limited to a maximum of three tasks) Quality Assurance - Three-card limit (1 QA engineer limited to a maximum of three cards) Deployed - Unlimited
Do not expect developers to be wise, and limit their WIP on their own. If you throw everything from the To-Do list to developers, it will be like giving too many toys to a child. Instead of playing with one toy they will just throw them around, creating chaos in your neat home, and still, they will not be happy and you can expect tantrums.
It is your job, as a project manager, to assure that the To-Do list is prioritized properly, and tasks are assigned to developers no sooner than needed.
A properly managed Kanban Board will give you a clear picture of your project status at a glance. You can see that your developers have enough work, that you have prepared new tasks they can take over once their assignments are done, and that your QA engineer is waiting for new tasks to review.
Use Trello to Manage Your Kanban Board
Trello is a web-based Kanban project management application. It enables easy, real-time collaboration between team members and even multiple teams and projects.
To create a board in Trello click the “Create new board …” menu item, and set a title for your board.
You will start with an empty board. Use the “Add list …” box to create columns for your Kanban cards.
By clicking “Add a card…” at the bottom of any of the lists, you can easily create a task. Each card you create should represent a task that will be executed by a team member.
Cards in Trello can be customized in many ways:
- Assign team members responsible for executing a task
- Color code them depending on specific groupings you would like to add
- Set due dates
- Add attachments
- Add custom fields such as a checklist where you can track the progress of smaller elements that comprise a task
- Team members can comment on a card, and everyone will be notified of any change that is made.
Visualization is everything in Kanban, so here is how a card looks on the board:
Just by looking at the card, without opening the detailed view you can see that:
- Task to setup GitHub Code Repository is waiting to be executed in To-Do list.
- Task is due by January 27.
- Task has a description.
- There is one comment on the task.
- There is a checklist of two items, and none of these items are currently completed.
- Task is assigned to user DS, who will pick it up next.
- Task belongs to a group of green color cards, which means that it is required before the project is started.
Estimate Time And Complexity of Development Work
Planning and managing a project is impossible without understanding the effort and time needed to complete a certain task. However, one of the hardest things to do in software development is to determine how long it will take to deliver a new software product or feature.
Scrum, one of the most popular Agile principles, relies heavily on estimations, whether they are based on time or “complexity points.”
The team should spend significant time scoping out the task.
This is because Scrum is based on time-boxed intervals, when a certain group of tasks is expected to be completed. In order to plan delivery you need to have a full understanding of all the work planned for that time-box.
Kanban does not rely on time-boxed deliveries, and you can plan daily delivery if you want to. It relies on optimizing the flow, which means that the team’s focus is to complete and empty the WIP column as soon as possible.
The team doesn’t spend time estimating work much in advance. A developer will pick up the next item from To-Do; complete it as soon as possible; and pick up another task.
This doesn’t mean that a team should not estimate the volume of their workload.
You can use your weekly or daily calls to update, and verify due dates.
However, for a small team, it’s more important to assure that developers are working on the highest priority task at any given moment and that there are no bottlenecks, forcing a developer to pause their work.
