So what do an American supermarket,
the Toyota manufacturing process
and the humble sticky note have in common?
They were all important steps in the development
of Kanban cards, as we know them today.
Kanban cards are visual and sometimes physical cards
that help a team understand the status of a work item,
the history of a work item
and what it takes to get that work item done.
I'm Max.
I'm a product marketing manager on Jira Software
and I have shifted 641 Kanban cards
since I started working at Atlassian.
Basically, every large work item I've ever touched,
has had a card made for it.
And I know that I shift about 1.05 Kanban cards a day,
because I'm so consistent, because I have this data,
I can use this for planning.
This is the benefit I want to help you achieve
through today's conversation about Kanban cards.
Now, I don't know about you,
but when I'm in the supermarket,
I'm not exactly having life-changing discoveries.
Most times, I can't even remember why I'm there.
But I'm not much like Taiichi Ohno,
who is the father of the Toyota manufacturing system.
So Taiichi Ohno was walking the halls
of an American supermarket
and he noticed that employees would only stock shelves
that they saw were depleted;
when there was extra space on the shelves,
they would stock new inventory.
This is largely called a demand-driven system,
something that he hadn't seen before.
Taiichi Ohno took this observation back to Toyota,
where he used it to create a demand-driven system.
Imagine a colored index card in the bottom
of a bucket of bolts.
As the bolts would be start to be used,
the index card would start to reveal itself.
When it was fully revealed,
it was time to order new bolts.
These Kanban cards formed the basis
of the Toyota manufacturing system
and informed how we use them today
in Kanban work management.
The use of these cards rapidly evolved
into this artifact that would follow a work item
through the factory, through different stages of completion.
This story and this notion of an artifact
following your work through stages of completion,
is what influences how we deal with Kanban cards today.
Here are some components of a Kanban card
through, maybe, a software development team.
It wants things like a title, a brief description,
you'll want an owner,
maybe some useful information like a label,
a due date, an SLA, or maybe how much time
has been logged on the issue.
And lastly, at a glance, you want to know
what stage in the workflow is this card in?
This information is not static;
it's not something you set and forget.
As a card moves through the workflow,
the story grows and changes over time.
By the time a card is done,
you'll have all of the updates from all of
the workflow stages, any blockers it's run into
and any other useful context or information.
So how and when do you create these Kanban cards?
A lot of Kanban teams are service teams,
like IT or help desks.
They choose Kanban for the ability to continuously
start new work and continuously deliver work.
These teams oftentimes have service desk software,
something like Jira service desk,
where their customers, both internally or externally,
can create tickets for the team, based on their needs.
Those tickets are automatically turned into Kanban cards
that the team can pull into their workflow
when they're ready.
Other teams, like software development teams,
will make cards themselves in planning meetings.
Hopefully these cards are still based
on what the customer wants,
they're just not directly created by the customer.
And a lot of teams have both,
they have planning meetings where they do
some internal planning,
and they have a service desk
where the customers can reach them directly.
So that's how cards are often created.
As for who creates the cards,
that actually harkens back to the Kanban principles.
Kanban encourages active leadership at all levels,
meaning it shouldn't just be managers creating cards
for their team; all team members should be empowered
to create cards and the team should be empowered
to pull the cards they're ready to work on
into the workflow.
I want to close with a brief discussion
on how to size Kanban cards.
How much work should each card be?
I've learned from my experience
that I do about one card per day.
So when I'm writing them,
I think about them being six to eight hours of work.
And this is a good baseline; it's where I would start.
Write cards that your team can move forward
about every day or two.
Now, there's no hard and fast rules,
so just start there and see what happens.
You might have to make changes and that's okay.