- Your organization will likely
place certain demands on your team.
That makes sense.
After all, that's what your teams exist.
They help the organization deliver some product or service.
Chances are your organization
will have inconsistent demands.
One department might have a lot of demand one week,
and a different department will demand even more the next.
There's not much your team can do
about increasing or decreasing your organization's demands.
Instead, you have to focus on your team's capacity.
Most organizations don't think about your team's capacity
when they create a demand.
That's actually why a lot of teams get into trouble.
Outside departments try to stuff their work
into your team's workflow.
They often don't realize that overloading the team
slows down everyone's work.
Even if they did realize that, then they might not care.
They're probably not interested
in optimizing the overall organization.
Instead, they're just focused
on fixing their immediate challenges.
That's why it's up to the kanban team to be very disciplined
in how they determine their capacity.
Remember that demand can come
in many different shapes and sizes.
You can think of it as cars
and trucks going across a bridge.
You should treat them differently
when you're determining your capacity.
One way to visualize your capacity is
by splitting your columns with horizontal rows.
In a sense, you're creating a separate lane for cars
and a separate lane for trucks.
You could also set WIP limits on your columns
so you have a two card limit for in progress
and a three card limit for done.
You could see that there are two sets of limits.
There are the horizontal lines or swim lanes
which reflect the size of the work item.
Then there are the limits on the vertical columns
which show the team's capacity.
Think of it this way.
Imagine you had three bridges,
each one representing a column.
There are tollbooths
at the beginning and end of each bridge,
but there are only two tollbooths
that give out kanban cards,
the first analysis bridge and the last testing bridge.
There's also small islands that connect each bridge
that you can call buffers.
The booth at the very beginning of the bridges
only has 10 kanban cards for trucks
and 40 kanban cards for cars, so essentially two swim lanes,
one lane labeled 10 for trucks
and another lane labeled 40 for cars.
These lanes make sure that the larger trucks
don't put too much strain on the bridge's capacity.
The team knows that each bridge
will take a different amount of time to cross.
The analysis bridge only has 10 vehicles
on the bridge at one time.
The development bridge has 20 vehicles on it at one time.
Finally, the testing bridge allows 20 vehicles at once.
Now, you might notice
that the bridges don't make a distinction
between cars and trucks.
You could have 20 trucks on the development bridge.
But remember that the very first tollbooth
at the very first bridge
only gave out 10 kanban cards for trucks.
That means that there can be no more than 10 trucks
on all three bridges at once.
The vertical columns regulate the capacity for the team.
Each bridge can only have so many vehicles.
That's your maximum work in progress.
The horizontal columns help you manage the demand
for each work item.
That's the way you make sure you don't have too many trucks
on your bridges.
You can see that these horizontal and vertical limits
work together to limit the demand on your team's capacity.
Just remember that the horizontal limits are
for the whole system.
Think of them as the greatest number of trucks
that you can fit on all your bridges,
while the vertical columns limit the work in progress
for each step in the process.
That's the maximum number of vehicles for each bridge.