on their function’s specific needs. Another challenge was managing the different types of work the team was
responsible for performing. Requests for new features from internal customers were mixed with support requests and the need to work on technical debt and strategic projects.
A ticket management tool was in place and being used, but there was difficulty in understanding the order of priority of the tickets logged in the system. The ticket management system was a great place for storing information, but it was not providing great visibility of the total workload. What was needed was a way to
visualize the workload so that items could be prioritized, and flow created. However, visualizing the team’s
workload was just the first step. In total, four key challenges were identified:
- visualizing the total workload
- managing work overload
- coordinating the needs of internal customers
- managing different types of work.
VISUALIZING THE TOTAL WORKLOAD
To get a clear view of the workload, it first had to be lifted out of the ticket management system. The concept of Kanban and a Kanban board was widely spread within Spotify but had not, until then, been used by the team. The work being done by Olingo and their fellow coaches provided a great opportunity
to make use of Kanban, in conjunction with ITIL, to track and prioritize different processes carried out by the team. A portable whiteboard was used, and tickets from the ticket management tool
printed. The first version was basic, but kicked off discussions and ideas for
improvement. The work items were sorted into columns, with each column representing a stage in the workflow, for example ‘to do’ or ‘work in progress’.
One challenge that immediately became obvious was the size of the workload.
Even if the team had realized that the workload was hidden in the ticket management system, the situation was worse than expected.
MANAGING WORK OVERLOAD
To make the workload manageable, work in progress (WIP) limits were introduced for each column. The WIP limits provide an upper boundary on how many work items can be allowed in each column.
A limit of three would mean that a maximum of three work items would be allowed at any one time. To ensure
that each item had an owner and that individual staff members were not overloaded, so called ‘avatars’ were introduced. An avatar is a representation of a team member, in this case in the form of a whiteboard magnet with the person’s picture on it. For each team member there were two magnets, meaning that a team member could be assigned a maximum of two work items at the same time.
Now that the workload was visualized the next challenge became apparent; how could the work items in the ’To do’ column be managed? This was particularly problematic as most of the work items in this column came from outside of the team.