The board you already have

The problem with the boards nearly everybody has

Three columns and a wall of stickies. It took an afternoon to set up, everyone can see it, and it is a real improvement on a spreadsheet.

And it is also where most boards stop, which is where most of the benefit is left behind. Look at Doing: seven things. Not seven things being worked on; seven things started. Nothing on the board limits how many cards can be there, so Doing holds whatever people decided to start. Most of those cards are not being worked on right now: they are waiting for someone. That is a queue.

Keep hold of that word. Everything that follows is about what a queue costs and what it takes to get rid of one, starting with the same board, grown up.

Adding a more structured process

Teams that stay with a board soon grow it past three columns, and this is the shape it usually takes: the wall this site ships, with a team of eight developers on it. "Doing" becomes a few steps, because being written and waiting for somebody to look at it are different places to be:

1. Implement is where the work happens. Inside it, Locked is a column for a card that cannot move (waiting on another team, a decision, a broken environment), so it stops passing for work in progress.
2. Review is where every pull request is reviewed by somebody else on the team.
3. Validate is a manual test of each task, by a person, before it ships. Not every team does it, and we recommend it: now that AI writes so much of the code, somebody checking that what was built makes sense from a user's point of view is worth more than ever.
4. Deploy is there to see what has been finished.

It looks like a healthy board. Everybody has something to do, cards move every day, and anybody walking past can see where each piece of work is. Most teams stop here.

The number nobody looks at

Now put one more number on every card: how many days since somebody started it. Almost no board shows it. The tools show where a card is, not how long it has been there, and nobody remembers when each thing was started, so nobody knows. It is the most important number on the wall.

The oldest cards say 12. That is the first surprise for nearly every team that turns the counters on: did you know your work stays open that long? And it is not the odd card. Measure it over months and this is what the board comes to:

The board

No limits

Finished a week

10.0

In progress

24.1

Cycle time

12.1 days

Constraint

Implement

From the moment somebody starts a change to the moment it is done takes 12 days on average, for about four days of actual work. That number is the team's cycle time, and it is the one a customer feels: how long they wait after hearing "we are on it".

Nobody here is lazy. While a developer waits for an answer or a review on one card, they start the next one, and from then on they switch between the two. Each card is only being worked on half of the time, so four days of work stretch over eight, and the time spent waiting for review and validation comes on top. Eight developers, 24 cards in progress: the team is not slow, its work is waiting.