Overcoming Blockers And Defects In A Kanban Process

Overcoming Blockers in Kanban

The Kanban process relies on the smooth flow of work through the Kanban board. However, teams often encounter issues that block progress and create bottlenecks. Common blockers in Kanban include:

Lack of priorities – Without clear priorities, teams struggle to sequence work and ensure smooth flow.
Unclear requirements – Vague, incomplete requirements cause delays when work reaches later stages.
Unplanned work – Support issues, bugs, and other unplanned work interrupting planned work flow.
Dependency delays – Teams waiting on other teams, systems, or stakeholders before continuing.
Inadequate skills – When team members lack needed skills to complete assigned work.
Overburdened team members – Bottlenecks created when specific team members become overburdened.

To overcome these issues, Kanban teams can:

Set clear priorities – Prioritize work items and sequence them based on priority, dependencies, and team bandwidth.
Improve requirements definition – Refine requirements earlier with product owners and stakeholders to avoid downstream delays.
Reduce unplanned work – Systematically address sources of unplanned work to reduce interference.
Coordinate dependencies – Identify dependencies using Kanban cards and coordinate work with upstream/downstream teams.
Develop team skills – Conduct training and hire specialists to build missing skills.
Balance workloads – Ensure work is distributed evenly and shift work between team members if needed.

Dedicated Kanban leaders help teams overcome blockers by encouraging process improvements, facilitating collaboration between teams, and coaching team members.

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Identifying and Addressing Defects

Allowing defects to flow downstream and remain unaddressed erodes trust in the Kanban process. Teams should actively identify potential defects using practices like:

Code reviews – Peer review of source code to uncover logical flaws, bugs, vulnerabilities.
Unit testing – Automated software testing to validate units of code meet requirements.
Integration testing – Verifying seamless integration between newly developed code and existing systems.
User acceptance testing (UAT) – Validation of deliverables by product owners and end-users.

When defects inevitably occur, Kanban teams must address them promptly. Best practices include:

Stopping the line – Freezing work when major defects occur to swarm and address issues immediately.
Demand management – Pulling back work-in-progress to focus bandwidth on fixing critical defects.
Root cause analysis – Performing analysis to understand causal factors behind defects and prevent recurrence.
Continuous improvement – Using lessons learned to implement preventative policies, improved testing, and better requirements.

Automated testing integrated into CI/CD pipelines catches defects rapidly so they can be fixed before impacting downstream work or the customer. Tracking key metrics helps teams measure defects and monitor improvement efforts.

Improving Process Flow

The core goal of Kanban is enabling smooth, predictable flow of work. Teams can improve process flow by:

Limiting WIP – Capping work-in-progress to unfinished tasks to focus effort and uncover bottlenecks.
Analyzing cycle times – Monitoring the time to complete work items in each pipeline phase to find delays.
Increasing transparency – Using a Kanban board and backlog to visualize work and highlight stuck items.
Tuning meetings – Holding daily standups, refinement sessions, and retrospectives to plan, prioritize, and improve.

Additional tactics to improve flow include standardizing processes, breaking down large work items, balancing team capacity, automating manual steps, and improving collaboration between teams and disciplines.

Most process flow inhibitors stem from policies, procedures, and behaviors getting in the way of work completion. Performing root cause analysis on stuck work items can help leaders understand why policies negatively impact cycle times.

Ultimately, Kanban facilitates continuous, incremental process improvements guided by measured outcomes vs. rigidly following predefined processes.

Measuring Success

Kanban teams assess process improvements using metrics like:

Lead time – The total time for work items to move through the Kanban system from request to delivery.
Cycle time – The time to complete work items from when work starts to completion.
Throughput – The number of work items completed by a team within a certain time period.
Work-in-progress – The number of work items at each step of the workflow.
Defect escape rate – The number of defects reaching customers divided by the total number of defects.
Mean time to repair – The average time needed to resolve defects.

Tracking quantified outcomes through the Kanban analytics practice allows data-driven assessment of implemented improvements.

Reduced lead and cycle times, increased throughput and productivity, and lower defect rates indicate smooth flow and process control. Decreases suggest delays, blockers, and quality issues requiring intervention.

By continually inspecting metrics, teams can objectively guide evolution of processes, policies, tools, and capabilities driving work through the system.

Expert Tips and Best Practices

Experienced Kanban practitioners offer these tips for overcoming common challenges:

Start small – Introduce Kanban with a pilot project before scaling more broadly.
Change incrementally – Evolve processes gradually guided by measured outcomes vs. abrupt transformations.
Prioritize ruthlessly – Keep teams laser focused on delivering work with highest customer value.
Impose work-in-progress limits – Limit amount of unfinished work items to reveal bottlenecks.
Automate testing – Automated regression testing in staging environments surfaces defects rapidly.
Embed experts – Supplement teams with specialists like business analysts and database engineers to build collective ownership.

While Kanban offers flexibility, companies must carefully balance standardized systems and continuous improvement mindsets to scale successfully.

Consistently stepping back to analyze metrics avoids reactionary changes, instead encouraging deliberate, measured process evolution guided by outcomes.