Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, said “the purpose of Kanban is to bring troubles to the surface.” We bring these troubles to the surface by visualizing the work and the process it moves through, constraining how much work we handle at a time to see what problems get in our way, and continuously improving that flow to get more and more things of better quality completed faster and faster.  But, did you know that how you design your Kanban board can shape the information you are able to see and how you process that information?

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I was on the phone recently with Stacy, a dev team manager.  During our conversation, I shared the concept of using relative card positioning, or stack ranking, to show the priority of items of a queue on a kanban board. Personally, I have used this tactic very successfully in the past as it provides visual cues to both the doers that need to know what’s next, as well as to the requestors of work who want to know when we’ll get to their item. When I finished explaining, Stacy said, “Yes, we’ve tried that in the past but we don’t do it anymore. The problem was that requestors got upset that their item was number five in our queue.”

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