When I talk about Kanban, I sometimes get asked: „What shall
we do with all the tickets after they are done?“ Two years ago my answer was:
„If the task is really done, just throw the ticket away.“ But during the past
couple of months I’ve learned that there are many useful things you can do with
the done tickets. Here are my top 5.
Note: I’ve faked all the pictures shown in this article, but I’ve seen all of the described scenarios in real life.
1: The leaf approach
Leave all tickets in the done column until they fall off the
wall – like leaves fall off the trees in fall (this, of course, only works if
you use sticky notes, otherwise you might be waiting for a long time:-) The
adventage is that it has a motivating effect, because it shows to the team and
everyone passing by how much the team gets done.
2: Separate by weekdays
How much do you get done on which weekday? Are there
paterns? If these questions are interesting for you, you can simply divide the
done column into five swim lanes – one for every day of the week. At the end of
the week (or the beginning of the new week) you hold a quick retrospective: How
are the done tickets distributed amongst the weekdays? Why is that? Meetings?
Incidents? And do we see patterns regarding which type of work is usually
finished on what day of the week? After you have talked about this, take a
picture and then throw the tickets away (or use them in any other way you find
useful).
Note: I think I‘ve read about this technique in a blog post before
I suggested it to one of my clients who now applies it. If you know the
original reference, please let me know.
Update: Now I found out that it was this post by Jesco von Voss I saw this technique before.
Update: Now I found out that it was this post by Jesco von Voss I saw this technique before.
3: Use them for generating your charts
If you’ve ever played GetKanban, you know that updating
charts is not as much effort as we might think. Often it only means plotting
one data point for every ticket you get done. So what if we wouldn‘t plot points but use our done tickets as dots
instead? This ist not only more fun, but it also provides us with additional
information, because we still have all the information written on the ticket
available. Use this charts for your daily work, for feedback meetings, for
forecasting and for discussing with your stakeholders.
Here’s an example of a Time Distribution Chart (aka Spectral
Analysis Chart).
Of course a Run Chart (mostly named „Cotrol Chart“ although we
don’t use control limits) is also possible and not much effort, either.
And here’s a suggestion for a Burn Up Chart built with
sticky notes. I’m also thinking about using Cumulative Flow Diagrams this way.
I think it would look really cool. The only disadvantage would be that you have
to clone tickets avery day (because you don’t take tickets from „testing“,
„developing“ etc. off the wall before they are done).
4: Make improvement opportunities visible
Imagine you are working in a big company. Your team is
supposed to build features, but in fact you are doing bug fixes and
enhancements for other teams most of the time. You feel that this is a problem,
but it’s mostly a gut feel. So why not collect the done tickets for a longer
period of time, so that you will see how the mix of Features, Bug Fixes and
Enhancements is? This picture might be an eye opener for your team and your
stakeholders:
After you have visualized that, you can go even one step
further. Another problem is that your team has interdependencies with other
teams. This leads to the situation where you get your tickets done, but after
that they will not be deployed for weeks or even months because of these
dependencies and the complicated deployment process. You have talked about with
other teams and your boss but they seem not really to understand how bad this
situation really is. So you change your done column into a time line with the
next planned release as the end date. Now you get a really good picture how
much costs (cost of delay) your company generates, bacause valuable features
have to wait for weeks before the will be deployed. And this picture shows
another truth: Of course you could work on becoming more efficient in your
team. But this is probably only a tempest in the teapot. The real big leaver
here is to reduce the wait time before deployment! And why does the mix of features change over time? Why do we have so many pink tickets just before the release?
![]() |
Click to enlarge |
5: Box them
When I visited one if my clients for the first time, I saw
they had a box next to their board in which they collected all the done
tickets. I asked: „What do you do with all the tickets?“ The answer was one of
the coolest things I‘ve ever heard. „We ship them to our competitor.“ Until today
I’m not sure if they were kidding or not.
Summary
- There are many ways to use your done tickets. Which technique is appropriate for you? There is only one way to find out: Try. If it does not provide you with any value, try something different! What I‘ve learned is that done tickets can be used for better understanding your team‘s/organization‘s demand as well as its capability. You can use them as a learning tool, and it can be a great tool for showing improvement opportunities. And last but not least: It should be motivating.
One disadvantage of some of the techniques I‘ve described in this post is that they require a lot of space. So it might not be possible to simply copy them. But I‘m sure you will find a way to emerge new techniques that fit your context.
Do you find this useful? Do you have any other examples what to do with done tickets? Please share them!
P.S. Mike Cohn has just tweeted another possibility for using your done tickets: decorate your Christmas tree ;-)
Regarding version 2: I wrote about the layout by weekdays in http://minds.coremedia.com/2012/09/11/a-world-without-burndowns-the-unified-taskboard/
ReplyDeleteCheers, Jesco
Jesco,
DeleteThanks for the hint! I updated the post and mentioned your post as the source.
Cheers,
Arne
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ReplyDeleteGreat read tthank you
ReplyDelete