A Great Article from Kanban Chronicle
I just read a great article on an agile team's usage of a whiteboard to manage their one-piece flow via queues. I have been doing a substantially similar process, only using TargetProcess instead due to the distributed nature of the team.
The chief takeaways:
1) Enforce your queue limits. In this case, the team had more than two things in Pre-Dev Work In Progress (WIP), so they had to briefly "stop the line" and pull the overage back into the queue.
2) Keep the units of work small so that they can flow quickly from the start of the line to the end. One of the things that my team and I discovered is that certain development "orders" can be carved out of pre-dev WIP early, such as screen wireframes or page composites that can be implemented while other parts are waiting. If anything has to change, it's better to wrap up a work order with a "change order" than to sit idle for long periods of time.
3) Treat maintenance/support tickets just like new development - in other words, apply queue limits and divide the work into smaller chunks that can flow through the system more efficiently. You might want to continue to treat these items as a separate work line (as the team in this article does), or you might force all of this work to be prioritized together. I tend to go for a universal backlog of new dev and maintenance/support.
This blog is one to keep an eye on if you're interested in Kanban-style agile teamwork.
