Kanban Maturity Assessments

Kanban Maturity: From WIP Limits to Flow Efficiency

Like retrospectives, surveys are another mechanism for collecting feedback as input to continuous improvement. Surveys enable teams to provide feedback with ideas and suggestions for improving work processes, problem-solving, and innovation. These surveys often involve questionnaires and structured evaluations that lead to a comprehensive report, often visualized with charts, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and providing a benchmark for improvement opportunities and future strategy. The goal is to measure current performance, identify areas for improvement, and guide organizations in their transformation journey. This can help organizations adapt to change more quickly and effectively, and can lead to a more engaged workforce.

When conducting a survey to assess Kanban software development, the questions should cover the core principles: visualizing work, limiting work-in-progress (WIP), managing flow, making policies explicit, implementing feedback loops, and evolutionary change.

1. Strongly Disagree / Very Dissatisfied
2. Disagree / Dissatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Agree / Satisfied
5. Strongly Agree / Very Satisfied

Survey questions for a Kanban Assessment.

1. Work Visibility: Our team workflow and the status of all work items are clearly and visually displayed on our Kanban board
2. Board Accuracy: Our Kanban board is always up-to-date and accurately reflects the current state of our work.
3. Transparency: Anyone can easily understand our current focus and progress by looking at the Kanban board.
4. WIP Limit Adherence: Our team consistently respects and follows the agreed-upon work-in-progress (WIP) limits.
5. Focus on Task Completion: Following WIP limits helps our team focus on completing one task before starting another.
6. Context Switching: Reducing our WIP has decreased the amount of context switching and multitasking.
7. Bottleneck Identification: Our team can quickly identify and address bottlenecks that slow down our work.
8. Predictability: Our workflow is predictable, allowing us to accurately estimate when work will be completed.
9. Cycle Time Improvement: The time it takes for a work item to go from In Progress to Done is consistently improving.
10. Policy Clarity: Our team policies for how work is done (e.g., Definition of Done, moving a card) are clearly defined and well-understood by everyone.
11. Standardized Process: Our explicit policies help standardize how our team works.
12. Policy Review: Our team regularly reviews and updates our policies to improve our process.
13. Stakeholder Feedback: We receive regular and timely feedback from stakeholders on the work we deliver.
14. Response to Feedback: Our team is responsive and makes changes based on feedback from retrospectives and other reviews.
15. Data-Driven Improvement: We use metrics like Cycle Time and Throughput to make informed decisions about our process.
16. Evolutionary Change: Our team embraces small, incremental changes to improve our workflow rather than major, disruptive ones.
17. Shared Responsibility: Every team member feels a sense of ownership over improving our workflow.
18. Team Satisfaction: I am satisfied with how our team uses Kanban to manage our work.
19. Performance Improvement: Using Kanban has significantly improved our team’s performance.
20. Recommendation: I would recommend using Kanban to other software development teams.

How to Run an Assessment

There are many ways to approach this. I like to use an approach similar to a retrospective, since everyone is likely familiar and comfortable with it.

Gather the Data and the Team

• Create the survey using a spreadsheet, a tool like Google Forms, or an Agility Survey tool like this one.
• Get the team together physically, or virtually – Create a new survey form and share the URL
• Review agreed actions from previous assessment, decide whether to close or continue
• Each team member completes the survey by responding to each statement with a score of 1-5 (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). About 15 minutes.
• The data is collated and summarized, and should result in a report like the following: (Alternatively, the data can be collected asynchronously before the assessment meeting).

Generate Insights

• The facilitator sorts the responses to create a view of Strengths and Weaknesses.
• Identify Opportunities for Improvement

Decide What To Do

•  Next, brainstorm on actions that will address the most important issues
• Vote on the actions. Sort to see what everyone feels most strongly about.
• Decide on which actions will be adopted before the next survey

Close the Assessment

• Finally, get feedback on how the team felt about the survey itself.
• Thank everyone and close out the Assessment.