This post was written by AgileZen user and Rally coach Ben Carey – @bencarey
As an Agile Coach at Rally, I’m constantly looking for places to apply and learn more about new and emerging practices in both Agile and related disciplines. One of the ways that I do this is by maintaining a variety of passion-based projects and products that help me continuously learn and try out new approaches, practices, and theories. I was recently sharing how I was using Agile Zen on one of these projects and the team asked if I would share it with the larger community.
Fresh is a golf review site that focuses on reviewing high-end golf gear for progressive golfers. It’s one of those small side projects that never seems to end. Fresh initially started as a platform for me to try a variety of experiments related to Lean Startup concepts. Over the past six months the site has grown significantly and it’s quickly carving out it’s own niche among the golf review sites, blogs, magazines, and web sites.
Since day one, I’ve coordinated and visualized the work required for Fresh in AgileZen. Zen has given me the ability to visualize and observe the nature of the work that is required to keep the site going. In the past six months I’ve been through five or six versions of the board to model the workflow and I’ve (mostly) settled on the board that you see below.
The board allows me to quickly see where things are, to track the various flow metrics, to see bottlenecks, and to get an idea of where things currently stand at a glance. Given that Fresh is a side-project and the work is very stop-and-go, the ability to get re-oriented quickly is a huge advantage for me. A quick glance at the board lets me know where things are and helps me prioritize my efforts based on the funnel of reviews that are currently working their way through the system.
The review work of the site is highly dependent on outside companies and delegated work. Everything from the initial review requests, the back-and-forth of the conversations with the manufacturers, and the shipping of the product is very lightweight work on my end. All of this work is highly dependent on the companies that manufacture the products that are reviewed. Some companies turn around requests in hours and some take months. One of the benefits of Zen that I’ve noticed over time is the ability to see the patterns in how long companies sit in each column.
As far as WIP-limits are concerned, I’ve bounced back and forth between various limits for various columns. For the upstream columns (those that are related to getting product to review) – I’ve currently removed limits (although I still track performance to maintain a healthy flow of products). As the site has gained in popularity I’ve seen a significant conversion and throughput increase in the amount of time it takes for review equipment to make it to my front door. For the Reviewing column, I’ve currently set a limit of 3 items (the number of items I can be reviewing on the golf course). Every once in a while I’ll break that limit (as in the screenshot) because the type of items can be reviewed easily together. I will review an item for around a month on average before publishing the review. The downstream work of Publishing and Wrapping Up (contacting the manufacturer and posting to social channels) goes really fast and I rarely see anything sit in those columns for more than a few hours.
As far as the cards on the board go, I frequently use a mixture of the mark-down capability and tags to annotate the cards in different ways. For the cards on the board posted above, you can see that the card includes the manufacturer and the item that is being reviewed. After an item makes it into the Reviewing column, I add the suggested retail price of the item (this is data I track corresponding to my pirate metrics). I also use tags for the categories (which correspond to the categories on Fresh) and to track various other data that I might need to perform any type of measurements on. The tags can be used as filter criteria while looking at the board or reviewing performance.
In addition to the Fresh Review Board I also have a typical board that is a fairly familiar-looking kanban board. Anytime I do any work to the site, experiment with various business models, or do any type of user testing or validation, it makes it onto the standard board. While managing the two boards is a bit more involved – the nature of the work has a purely different context and the two boards feel justified in their existence.
Agile Zen has been a great tool for me and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to watch my boards evolve with the various changes in structure and approaches to Fresh. Although I’m really using Zen as more of a personal kanban for Fresh (it’s primarily just me) – the value of seeing the work and observing the nature of the system has been incredibly valuable.
If you have questions (or recommendations) about how I’m using Zen, then please feel free to comment. And if you golf, be sure to go and check out Fresh :)