Kanban

Heijunka board is the answer.  Heijunka board, unlike a simple scrum design board, allows all staffs to work independently.  This reduces redundancy among the team, and the team does not have to wait for another person to finish their task.

1. It gives real-time visibility into what people are working on
2. It helps you to visualize, optimize and take control of your workflow
3. It helps to limit work in progress to prevent bottlenecks
4. It helps to collaborate in real time with team members
5. Using the horizontal swim lanes, it helps to track multiple projects on one board

Yes, it is possible through an open source solution known JimFlow, and it can interact with Trac Tickets.  There are few benefits of it like:

• It prints tickets directly out of the ticket system
• It supports flow boards having columns
• It can take photos in custom intervals
• With ticket title and type, it can generate a digital version of the board
• Update ticket in ticket system on movement

Even though, both Lean and Six Sigma focus on waste reduction and improving efficiency, they key difference lies in the fact that Six Sigma is more inclined towards reducing the wastage margin towards 99.9999% whereas Lean is focused on setting up the right processes, the efficient pipeline, the culture and mindset of waste reduction.

So overall, it can be said that once we have matured Lean production in the organization then Six Sigma can be put on top of it.

• JIT [Just in Time]
• Kanban
• 5S

One of the most frequently posed interview questions on Kanban, be ready for it.  

5-S is one of the tools for implementing Lean in the project or organization. It organizes the work in the following manner:

• Sort: Eliminate what is not needed
• Set in order: organize the remaining items
• Shine: Inspect and clean the work area
• Standardize: Use either industry standards or create your own but follow them
• Sustain: Make sure you maintain it that way

Open Kanban can be considered as a movement based on the principles of Kanban and Agile to bring people from different backgrounds, domains, certifications together in a coherent manner. Because even though, people might come from manufacturing, construction, software etc. and they might have different certifications for their skills. But in the end, their goal is the same.

So Open Kanban comes into the picture wherever open source is involved.

So open Kanban is based on the freedom to change, adopt, modify as per need. And simplicity, where you just as much as you need and put it any shape as you want.

For example, in Open Kanban, the WIP [work in progress] is known as Reduce Base. That is, reduce the batch size of operations.

The systems can be of 2 types. Push systems or Pull systems.

Push systems mean we the owners, keep pushing work into the pipeline as much as possible with the hope that it would get processed and it would lead to maximum utilization. Whereas in Pull system, we design the system in such a way that it pulls the material from outside as and when the bandwidth frees up. So, velocity or efficiency is consistent.

Pull-based systems are a kind of JIT [Just in time environments].

Queuing theory and flow concepts align with it in the manner, that in order to have efficient operations with good velocity and if you are trusting the system to pull the material as needed then the entire flow in the pipeline needs to be smooth and uniform. And flow can be uniform if it adheres to querying theory that essentially says that only enough work should be queued for each node that can be processed without creating bottlenecks.

So, this way, these three concepts build WIP [Work in progress] limit concepts of Kanban.

A staple in Kanban interview questions, be prepared to answer this one.  

Essentially, the implications of Little’s law are that we can reduce the wait time by improving the processing time and by controlling the queue length.

For example: if our capacity is to manage 4 requests per minute, but we have an inflow of 8 requests per minute, then obviously, we have a wait time of 1 minute for first 4 items in the queue. So this is going to lead to a bottleneck and add to the queue.

But if we improve our processing to 8 requests per minute, there will be no bottleneck.

To achieve this, either we make an investment in better processors or capacity or find ways to improve the WIP limit through efficiency improvement techniques such as Value stream mapping.

• Risk review at Monthly grain
• Strategy review at quarterly grain
• Service delivery review on a weekly basis
• Operations review every month
• Stand up meetings daily
• Replenishment meetings on weekly grain
• Delivery planning meeting for each delivery cycle.

Blocker clustering is a technique to group the blockers into clusters on the graph then analyze them. The graph lists down all the reasons on X axis and Y axis is the impact.

Using this data, the blockers and blockages are denoted by a DOT on the chart then we are able to understand the reasons that are primary reasons for blockers in the order of intensity. So, it makes sense to solve them first. This is blocker clustering.

This question is a regular feature in Kanban interview questions, be ready to tackle it.  

Cumulative flow diagram is a graphical representation of flow in the system over a period. The red color shows the amount of work that is not yet started, the green shows delivered, and yellow shows in progress.

Over a period, red should constantly decrease and green should constantly increase, with yellow being steady until the end.

CFD diagram shows the flow in the system over a period. So, if, at a time, there no increase in green but red is not decreasing either and at the same time, yellow is constant or increasing then it means. The pipeline is stuck because it shows processing is full, but requests are not getting completed.

Little’s law states that the average number of work items in a stable environment is equal to their average completion rate multiplied by their average time in the system.

• Average wait time (Wq) = Average Queue length (Lq) x Average Processing rate (λ - Lamda) 
• Work in Progress (WIP) = Throughput x Cycle Time (Average Time in the System)

This is a frequently asked question in Kanban interview questions.  

The benefits of Scrumban are:

• No need for upfront planning
• Involves team concept, unlike Kanban
• It involves sprint and increases the productivity of the team compared to Kanban
• No changes can be done to Sprint Backlog
• Product Owner can be involved in the team
• Daily Scrum- it helps the team to self-organize and self-manage
• Sprint review- it involves business stakeholders, and they can give their feedbacks
• It includes retrospective

It is very important to differentiate the developers about the test case that is failed and returned and the test case that is ready or fresh to test.  To differentiate this to the developer, you can split READY option in Kanban into two categories a) Re-open b) Ready.  Re-open option status will have test-cases that are failed while ready option should have a new test case that is yet to be tested.

In Kanban, Power-ups allows you to customize your board as per your need.  It adds various spectrum of features to your Kanban board like-

• Card block
• Card aging
• Developer tools
• Team activity widget
• Task navigator
• Auto-assign
• Add task box
• Calendar widget
• Web attachment

This question is a regular feature in Kanban multiple choice questions, be ready to tackle it.  

It applies to optimize principle of Lean by creating value streams and hence finding ways to cut down on wastage occurring in the entire pipeline.

Time Tracker provides a detailed summary of the work done at that instant of time.  It is useful in many ways like:

• Time reports by project, user or task
• Detailed reports about the work done
• Manageable time entries
• Easy time tracking

This is a frequently asked question in Kanban interview questions.

To link card together in Kanban, there are two ways:

• You can use tags to link two cards: First, you have to create cards and have to link cards using the same tag and then you can search all tasks linked using the search option
• Using unique URL: Each card in Kanban has a unique URL, and you can copy this URL and paste it to another card’s external link fields.