I read about the Ultimate Clean Up Day at TargetProcess. For those living under a different rock than I do, they make some great agile project management software (http://www.targetprocess.com/).
In the article (which you should read), MIchael Dubakov reports that their Planned queue sometimes has 20-50 items in it. So they had an all-hands "clean up" day, moving a whole bunch of items from Planned the whole way across their Kanban board.
Sounds great, sounds fun, and I think as an infrequent fun team-building exercise, it is probably a good thing to do. Imagine the team "opening the floodgates" on the backlog, cherry picking some easy, fun things to take to completion in a day!
But - I think there is a bigger opportunity here, and that's to right-size the Planned queue limit.
20 items in planned is way too many if, as Michael reports, that many stories are stuck in Planned for weeks at a time. *tsk tsk* Michael - you make software that lets you set a queue limit, so please use it!
I would add up the queue limits on queues between Planned and Done. For instance, In Dev + Ready For Test + Tested = 5.
Then, set a matching queue limit on the Planned queue, then watch how stories flow across the rest of the board.
Unblock anything that jams up the flow. If any story sits in the same queue for more than 1 work day, that is a "jam" even if other stories are flowing through the queue around it. I would do a quick analysis and either un-jam that story, or reject it back into the backlog for additional product management care.
TargetProcess supports all of this and more. If you are doing Scrum, XP, or Lean, or some combination of them, TargetProcess should be on your review list.
One question though - I wonder what is in all of those trash bags? :|
Only increase the limit if