Lean and Kanban for IT Operation: Kanban board

People don't know what you're doing.

This is especially likely for non-technical "business people" but there may even be a large number of developers that have very little familiarity with what happens in operations.

The consequence of this is that there is a tendency to treat the operations team as if it's a magic bucket with unlimited capacity.  If I don't understand what they do, then they're probably not doing anything.

To deal with this, you need to make the work, which is naturally invisible, visible.  One way to do that is to setup a kanban board.

An example kanban board
Imagine a board with the following:

The work would be represented by index cards that would be moved across the board as the work progresses through the workflow.

A key point to be note is the Do-Wait cycle that occurs in In-Progress.  The nature of operations work tends to exhibit this kind of phenomena where you do something and then you have to wait for a third party to respond.

The work is represented by colour-coded index cards based on the type of work:

Avatars are attached to the cards in order to communicate who is working on what:

If work becomes blocked, there is a blockage reason attached to the card:

If the work must be done by a particular date, that date is attached to the card:

Note that your specific kanban board can and probably should look different.

A few other examples:

Sysadmins Board from IT Ops Kanban: http://itopskanban.wordpress.com/sysadmins-board/

"Our first Kanban board for IT Operations and Support", http://www.systemsoup.org/2009/12/our-first-kanban-board-for-it-operations-and-support/ 

Spotify operations kanban board: http://www.infoq.com/articles/kanban-operations-spotify 

Physical or electronic?

My personal preference is using physical kanban boards, however, every IT operations team I've worked with has eventually moved to electronic tools.  This has usually been due to synchronising with geographically distributed team members.

The key thing to remember is that you are trying to expose your work to people external to the team, not just internally.  So even if you use electronic tools, make sure that you also expose this on a large display, project it on a wall, etc.

I would also suggest at least starting with a physical board as it's usually simpler to start and faster to adjust.

What to do

• Create your initial board with columns, avatars, etc. reflecting your understanding of the flow of work.  I would recommend that this first version should be kept simple.  Note that even if kept simple, you want to show what is actually happening NOT what you want to happen.
• Modify the design of your kanban board as you realise that it is not quite communicating correctly and / or as the workflow evolves