- Some Kanban teams struggle with what type of
information they should put on their cards.
There are plenty of good reasons
to have clearly written cards.
Remember that you want your team to have a certain
cadence as you pull work across the board.
That gets more difficult when your cards
are poorly written.
If this happens, the person has to go back
and figure out what the card means
before they estimate the work.
You also want your cards to be consistently sized.
You don't want one large card taking one month
and another large card taking two weeks.
This similar sizing helps you get a better sense
of the flow of work through your system.
Remember that metrics like the Cumulative Flow Diagram
depend on how many cards you complete.
If these cards are inconsistently sized,
then it's difficult to tell when you have a slow down.
Every card on the board should represent some work item.
Most Kanban teams had settled on using sticky notes
for these work items.
It's also very common to use different classes of service.
In general, these are different types of work
so if your team is working on a software product,
they'll typically use three classes of service.
They'll be Technical stickies, User Story stickies
and finally Defect stickies.
It's also common for Kanban teams to use different
colors for the stickies.
It's usually green for Technical stickies,
yellow for User Story stickies and red for Defects.
There are a few different reasons to use
different color stickies on your Kanban board.
For one, it actually makes the board
look much less monotonous.
Remember that the Kanban board usually takes up
the whole wall.
It's nice to have a little splash of color
when you're looking at your work.
Different color stickies can also help you
better understand your challenges.
So if there's too many green stickies, then you might be
spending too much time on operational issues.
Yet not all Kanban teams are working on a software product
so they might want to use different classes of service.
The class of services you create
depend on what your team is responsible for delivering.
You should create classes of service
based on what helps your team.
I once worked for an organization that was using
Kanban to improve their help desk.
They weren't trying to develop a product
instead they were using Kanban to help with
the organization's operational needs.
They created Classes of Service around the priority
of each ticket.
If the card kept a whole team from working,
then they used a red sticky note.
If it's just kept one person from working
then they used a yellow sticky.
Finally, if it was just a question or a training issue,
then they used a green sticky.
These different classes of service
didn't just help the team, they also helped communicate
their work to the rest of the organization.
If someone was wondering whether a ticket was unanswered,
they could just visit the Kanban wall
and see where they were in the system.
So if they saw a bunch of red sticky notes ahead of theirs,
then they understood why they might have to wait.
These different color sticky notes can also help the team
better understand their work.
If you see too many red sticky notes,
the team might recognize they're spending too much time
working on serious issues.
So they might want to reevaluate their process.
That's why it's important to put this information
on the card.
It's a key way to improve the visibility of the work
on your board.