6 months after we began using Kanban to two support / system administration teams they realized that the downside of having multiple projects running outweighed the possible upside.

These are checklists I have compiled to help my Kanban teams stay focused

"Anytime" Iteration planning Daily standup

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I currently coach a system administration team. Anyone who has worked in one knows the constant attention required and the difficulty to find  uninterrupted time. (phone ringing constantly..) 

Doing kanban, we do iteration plannings every week and they need to be fast and accurate and we only need to keep a 45 min window. We have experimented with different approaches, and this has been the best working.

Cycle time helps us monitor our system performance. So cycle time is a good  thing 🙂

But there is two ways of tracking it. First (obvious) way is by starting a stopwatch when an item enters system and stopping it when it exits. This gives a reliable measurement but only after we have passed the process.

But there is a better way!

In Scrum it is often perceived that planning takes place on sprint planning day. Getting the required parties in the same place and do planning is a good way of making real time decisions. But getting people together is a dounting or impossible task and this also neglects some of the thought processes that needs to take place before stories are estimatable.