Planning

Plan the Kanban product development

We need to talk about plans. One of the biggest misunderstandings about Agile is that you can’t plan. It's not true. You just can’t make detailed long term plans that must be followed and be super strict.

One way to handle this is to not make Gantt charts or excel lists with tasks, deadlines and assignments. If you do – you will be disappointed. One of the down sides with running an Agile Kanban project is that you can’t say exactly when things are going to be released and done.

If you do, it will most likely take longer time as you need to hold it off, dedicate developers to work on it and have business owners standing by cheering and champion it thru. Kanban is different, in that it moves from state to state in a pace that keeps up with the processing pace as the others in the system have.

If you rush you will pile up at these different stations and thus create waste. It will only take longer for it to be released. 

There may be certain features that you may not want to release to your users every day. You can still release them, using feature flags or other similar functionality. It's basically a small admin system or a code feature in which you can activate features for a selected group or specific customers when you need to.

This is how you make Product Owners and Kanban evangelists happy at the same time. It may sound crazy that you would have unused features sitting idle in the main code branch and thus released to production, however as long as they are properly managed and actively worked on, as in promoted and communicated by the Product Owner, it’s ok. Otherwise it’s even more waste.

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