Kanban in RTC
We are trying to implement Kanban for some projects. Our company already uses RTC and we are migrating to 4.0 this week.
I have already played a little with Kanban view for plans but the thing I wanted to know is the following.
- This view (Kanban) is very similar to Taskboard view with the difference that you can have a limit for each column to see whether you are exceeding you limit for Work in "any state". Is there any Kanban metric integrated, or if not, is there any way to extract kanban metrics from RTC? (E.g.: Lead Time, Cycle Time, etc)
- Also, Its very difficult to read the "Kanban Cards" from the plan. Since if you group the plan by Team member, you will have all the tasks spread among the team members and it wont be easy to see if the whole functionality is completed. And if you group the plan by iteration, and you have to add the name in the "Kanban Card" you wont be able to add much more information since it wont be shown. Is there any way to rezise the "Kanban Cards" to see the information I want to add in them? (I've tried to do this in RTC 3.0.1 and I cannot re-size the columns.
- Is there any other additional features that you are working related to Kanban? or is there any extension plug in that can be used to implement other features related to kanban?
Thanks.
Gonzalo
2 answers
In terms of viewing more info on the card, there is the rich hover. As you move the mouse across the card you can see a lot more detail. This also allows you to have many cards on the board on one screen. However, it would be nice to have the cards resizeable, and have even more control on the contents of the card.
The columns at the state level are resizeable - but I think you mean the cards themselves??
I could not see any Kanban specific reports - but you can add your own reports to RTC that could include these kinds of metrics.
Any suggestions or ideas (like the ones above) are gratefully received - please add them to new work items here on jazz.net.
I checked the work items, and there is a general work item on Kanban here:
https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=239727
anthony
If you are using anything other than v5 you might want to consider making categories or subcategories under your standard category schema that resembles the flow. This will give you the freedom to use the limited real estate v4 kanban cards have while providing a distinct way to track and report on your work. A possible benefit to this approach is that it can keep a unique approach associated to a team and does not impact an entire project areas teams. Another alternative is creating a new set of work items that model your flow. A third option is to modify the work flow processes. And a fourth option is to consider color coding cards to represent where they are in the flow.
As far as limits go you can set limits proactively per person if you have a mature team and know each of their capabilities and what their capacity is. Even the best tools will not help you with getting that right at first and by the time you do any tool will simply be perfunctory to the overall goal of measurement. So, if you follow my first, second or third options above you can pull the kinds of data you are looking for from the Jazz database. The last option is window dressing and might be better suited in combination with one of the others.