The Importance of Visualizing Your Work in a Kanban Strategy

Published on
6 minute read

In the world of Agile and Scrum, one crucial element often overlooked is the visualization of work. It’s not just about getting things done; it’s about understanding the flow of value within your system. As a Scrum Master or Agile practitioner, the ability to visualize your work will empower your team to be more effective, transparent, and aligned. Today, we’ll explore how visualization can transform your Kanban strategy, improve collaboration, and streamline processes for better results.

Why Visualization is Crucial

Visualization is a game-changer when it comes to implementing a successful Kanban strategy. It’s not enough to assume everyone is on the same page—without clear visual cues, your team might interpret workflows and priorities differently.

I’m a huge fan of tools like Azure DevOps and Jira that allow you to see your work on a board. These platforms make it easy to track the smallest units of value as they move across the board, giving everyone clarity on the status of tasks.

Here’s why it’s so effective:

  • 🟢 Clarity: At any point, if someone asks, “Where is this item?” the board provides a clear, visual representation of where things are.

  • 🟢 Accountability: With a visual board, it’s easy to spot bottlenecks or tasks that are stuck, ensuring accountability across the team.

  • 🟢 Transparency: Everyone in the team has a shared understanding of what’s being worked on and where things stand in the workflow.

But—and this is a big but—while visualization is essential, it’s not always easy to create.

The Challenge of Creating a Shared Visualization

One of the most common issues I see in teams is misalignment. You may think you’re all playing the same game, but without clear agreements and documented workflows, you’re likely playing different games with the same pieces. Let me give you an analogy that might resonate.

🎲 Board Games and Kanban: What’s the Connection?

I’m a bit of a board game enthusiast (yes, I’ve got a collection!). Imagine taking a board game off the shelf, throwing away the rulebook, and telling everyone to make up their own rules. Each player will interpret the pieces differently, and despite their best efforts, the game will fall apart. The same is true for your Kanban board.

If your team hasn’t sat down and defined the rules—the workflow, what gets visualized, and how the process works—you’re all playing different versions of the same game. And that leads to confusion and inefficiencies.

Writing the Rulebook: Defining Your Kanban System

The first step to creating an effective Kanban system is to write your rulebook. What are the rules of your workflow? How will things move from one stage to the next? It’s crucial to have these conversations as a team, so everyone is aligned.

Here’s a step-by-step approach to get started:

Step 1: Define What You’re Visualizing

  • Are you visualizing backlog items only?

  • Do you include bugs and issues?

  • How granular do you want to get with the units of value you’re tracking?

These are questions you need to answer together as a team. The smallest decisions, like what gets put on the board, can lead to misalignment if they’re not clearly defined.

Step 2: Map the Flow

Once you’ve decided what goes on the board, it’s time to decide how things move through your system. What are the stages of your workflow, and how does each piece of work transition from one stage to another?

  • 🔄 Backlog to In Progress

  • 🔄 In Progress to Review

  • 🔄 Review to Done

Each of these transitions should be clearly defined, so there’s no ambiguity about what needs to happen at each stage.

Step 3: Create a Workshop for Your Team

I recommend holding a workshop to map out the visualization. Get everyone together and build the board from scratch. Whether you’re using Azure DevOps, Jira, Trello, or a simple digital whiteboard like Miro or Mural, the key is to collaborate and agree on how the system works.

Here’s what the workshop should cover:

  • 📝 Write down the rules: What are the different stages of your workflow?

  • 📝 Agree on how to visualize work: Do you want to use color coding, labels, or different types of cards for different work items?

  • 📝 Document the process: Create a shared document that outlines the rules and the workflow, so everyone has a reference point.

The goal of this workshop is not just to create a perfect system from the start but to create a system that everyone agrees on. Even if the system is not 100% optimized yet, the alignment is key. Everyone should be playing the same game with the same rules.

Why Alignment Matters

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from years of working with teams is that alignment beats optimization every time. You can have the most efficient workflow in the world, but if your team is not aligned on how the system works, you’ll never reach your full potential.

By taking the time to define your Kanban system and visualize your work, you’re setting your team up for success. Everyone will be working toward the same goal, with the same understanding of how things should flow.

What If You’re Struggling?

If your team is struggling to define the workflow or visualize the system, don’t worry—you’re not alone. Many teams face this challenge, especially when they’re new to Kanban or Scrum. That’s why we offer world-class Kanban training and consulting services to help teams like yours implement effective Kanban strategies.

Bringing in Flow Metrics

For teams that are using Scrum, I always recommend bringing in flow metrics as a complementary practice. Flow metrics can help you understand where work is getting stuck, how long it takes for work to move through the system, and where you might have inefficiencies.

By combining flow metrics with your visual board, you can make data-driven decisions that improve your team’s performance over time.


Conclusion: Visualize, Align, and Succeed 🎯

Visualizing your work is a foundational practice in any successful Kanban or Scrum implementation. It provides clarity, transparency, and accountability for your team. But more importantly, it ensures that everyone is aligned on how the system works. Without that alignment, even the best-laid plans will fall apart.

So, take the time to define your workflow, create a shared visualization, and ensure your team is playing the same game. If you’re struggling to get started or need guidance on improving your system, we’re here to help. Our Kanban training and coaching services are designed to help teams implement best practices and achieve their goals. In the end, it’s not just about moving cards across a board—it’s about moving your team toward success.

A hugely important technique for any implementation of a Kanban strategy is to visualize your work. Right, you need to be able to see what’s going on. You need to be able to visualize that. I’m a big user of Azure DevOps. I know Jira has these features as well. But being able to visually see your cards moving across the board, the units of value, we don’t really care about tasks at this point, right? But your smallest unit of value, to see them flow across the board, see where things are. So if somebody asks you, “Oh, where’s this? What’s that? What’s going on with this?” it’s very obvious where and what it is.

That visualization, while super important, is actually super difficult to create because we generally make assumptions as a team about what each other think the system is. Okay, so I’ll think the system works like this, and another team member will think it works like that. But we’ll think we’re on the same page. We’ll think we understand each other on how the system works. But because we’ve never sat down and had that conversation about how this system works, then we don’t.

I have a, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I kind of like board games. If you were to take any one of these board games off my shelf and throw away the rule book and get four people together to decide they’re each going to decide how they’re going to use the pieces and move them around in order to get points, and then you’re going to work together to solve the problem that is the board game. You pick a cooperative one, but if we don’t agree what the rules are, then how could we possibly have a successful game, right? We’re not all playing the same game because we all have not agreed what the rules are. That’s why games come with a rule book.

The first part of implementing a Kanban strategy is you need to write your rule book. What are the rules of your system? How are you going to decide how things work? So even one of the first decisions is what are we going to visualize on this? What are we actually going to put on the board? Is it only things on our backlog, or is it bugs as well? What is it that’s going to go on there, and how does it move through this system? So creating that visualization is super important.

So what I recommend that you do is do a workshop. Get everybody together, sit down, and just build a board. Whether you’re building it in Azure DevOps or you’re building it in Jira or Trello, or just pop open Mural or Miro and use a digital whiteboard, right? Totally freeform. Make the decisions, write the notes, and document your system. How does your system work? And agree as a team. When you find differences on how your system is supposed to work, then at the very least, even if we’ve still got a system that might not be optimal, right? Because this is where we are right now, this is what we’re doing right now, we at the very least have a system that we all agree is the same system, right? Because if we want to play together, we want to play as a team, and we want to be successful together, we need to define what those things are. We need to define how the system works, and we all need to be playing in the same system.

If you’re struggling to decide how your system works and create a definition of workflow, then we can help you. We provide world-class Kanban training from Pro Kanban, as well as consulting and coaching for teams trying to implement a Kanban strategy. If you’re a Scrum team, then we always recommend bringing in flow metrics as a complimentary practice and have Kanban classes from Scrum the Door.

Strategy Operational Practices People and Process Team Collaboration Practical Techniques and Tooling Agile Frameworks Software Development Lean Thinking Agile Project Management Pragmatic Thinking

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