Lean from the Trenches

Chapter 5Scaling the Kanban Boards

The speed of a project is largely determined by how well everyone understands what’s going on. If everyone knows where we are right now and where we’re going, it’s much easier for everyone to move in the same direction.

As we approached staff levels of sixty people, this became a challenge. Each team had its own team board showing what was going on within the team, covering which features are in progress and who’s working on which task related to that feature. However, we were missing the big picture. What’s going in the whole project? Where’s the bottleneck right now? Which new features are coming down the pipeline? Which features will be finished in time for the release?

That’s why we created the project ...