The Kanban Board we show is a template that any team can start using.
We 100% advise each Team to start with a physical Kanban Board.
In this way the team will have a better chance to understand how tickets should flow. This will help them to understand all ITIL practices in a better way.
Most of the teams who are following ITIL practices will find this Kanban Board helpful for them to improve those practices.
With time each team ends up evolving their Kanban Board.
Backlog
All work that comes to the team is parked there.
There are no priorities, no names assigned to work parked here.
Each day the team review all new items coming into their Backlog, they check that those tasks belong to their queue (if not pass it to the queue it may belong), they make sure they understand what is needed to be done and they estimate the effort. Then the task moves to Ready.
Ready
Tasks here are prioritized by the Team Manager or Team Lead. Usually First In First Out, usually Incidents go on the top of the queue.
The team pulls from the top of this column to start working,.
This means that sometimes the person who is going to work on that tasks doesn’t have the skills, then this person should find someone in the team to cross skill and guide the work to be done so we can learn.
In Progress
Some Teams will break the In-Progress column into smaller columns one for each team member so that its easier for them to see who is doing what and to quickly find their cards.
- As well they don’t add WIP but they create those columns in a way that not more than 2 physical cards can fit in them so that people stay focused on working on 1 or 2 cards at the time maximum.
- It also helps to see which team members are not working on anything related to the Kanban board
- This may be because nobody is aware of what they are doing
- Sometimes people prefer to work on Nice to Have instead of what is a priority, so it’s a good time for the team Manager to get visibility of this sort of situations
- They may be working on the “black market” cards doing favors to colleagues instead of focusing on the team priorities
Schedule Changes
- When teams are starting with ITIL you will usually see this column empty
- This is a clear indication that the team is still not following the new Change process
- Sometimes it will be better to move this column to the right side of “InProgress” so that when team members want to move the card into “Review” column it will remind them to raise a Change if needed.
Review Column
Some Teams will add rows on the Review Column for example:
- Each row being a 1 day, 2 days… 5 days
- Each day they move all those tickets waiting on customer approval if customers haven’t come back after the work have been done.
- When cards get to day 5 then the team will close the card sending an email to the customer explaining that the work has been done and that after not getting any feedback from them they will proceed to close the card and if there are any issues the customer can contact them.
- It’s better to work this way than to close the ticket once is done without allowing the customer to say yes or no. If something is wrong then customers may not be able to reopen those cards and they will raise an incident.
- As well it generates good customer service not closing immediately but allowing the customer a few days to confirm.
Suppliers
Some teams will add a buffer column for suppliers
- They will park in this column any card waiting for suppliers to do some work
- Once the card is parked there the team put the date when the card was parked
- In this way, they can check if the supplier meets the SLA or not
- Unfortunately, not all ticket systems support SLA tracking or if they do they are not activated or properly configured
- As well its a good way for the Team Manager to be aware that the team may need help to escalate that they are not getting traction from the supplier.
Done
- All tickets that make it to the “Done” can be removed every Friday by End of Day or on Monday once the team gets into the office
- It’s advisable to count those tickets on the “Done” column and compare them to the amount of tickets on the Ticket System to understand if the team is still working on other Priorities that are not what the Team Manager defined on the Kanban Board.
