Granularity in Kanban

Kanban is pretty freeform, I'll admit. Coming from Scrum, which is pretty free-wheeling in itself, I feel like there's very little I'm "required" to do. I can kind of make it up as I go. While I think that's intrinsic to the adaptive nature of lean, and kanban in particular, it does feel a little like I'm out on my own.

One thing that's painfully obvious: the ready, in progress, and complete states are not granular enough.

I know, I know. That's obvious.

Still, I find myself adding a state in the workflow every day or so. Fortunately, it's incredibly easy to tweak the workflow w/o disrupting forward progress. After a week, here's where I'm at.















As you can tell, granularity organically grew as I got more comfortable w/ the process. There are different WIP limits in each section of "in progress." My particular need is different, since I'm using my transition to a new gig as my backlog, but in software development you still have the "i'm doing R&D, i'm working on unit tests, i'm waiting on infrastructure" types of states. You'll have an incredibly amount of flexibility in determining how you should gate or throttle your work in progress, but it will take time for a team to figure out exactly how they should tweak their limits.

All in all, I'm really excited to apply this methodology to an actual software project....