Stop 07 · Agile & Product Delivery for BAsTopics · 7/10

Kanban for BAs

In short

Support teams can't wait two weeks for the next sprint when a payment bug lands at 11 am. Kanban lets work flow continuously, while still stopping the team from drowning.

A continuous-flow alternative to sprint-based Scrum, visualized on a board with work-in-progress limits — common for support or maintenance-heavy BA work where a fixed sprint cadence doesn't fit well.

The purple blob at a chai stall with blank paper slips clipped to a string and four glasses of tea on a counter.

Think of it like this

The chai stall order string

Order slips hang on a string. The chaiwala only has four glasses on the stove at a time. When one is served, he picks the next slip. More slips on the string? Fine. More than four glasses at once? Everything burns.

Watch it happen

In Progress, with a WIP limit of 3

enqueue(Fix refund bug)

Fix refund bug

Front of the queue is coloured

1/5The first ticket moves into In Progress. One slot used out of three.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Visualise the work

A board with columns like To do, Analysis, In progress, Testing, Done shows where every item is.

Limit work in progress

A WIP limit caps how many items sit in a column. Less juggling means things finish faster.

Pull, don't push

People pull the next item when they have room, instead of having work dumped on them.

Measure flow

Track cycle time: how long an item takes from start to done. Shorter and steadier is better.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Setting up a Kanban board but no WIP limits.

Do this instead

Without limits it's just a to-do list. Start with a limit around team size and adjust.

Oops

Having an 'Analysis' column that quietly piles up with half-written requirements.

Do this instead

Watch your own column. If items wait there, the BA is the bottleneck.

Your mission

Your own Kanban board

~20 min

Quick check

The Testing column has hit its WIP limit, and a developer just finished coding a new item. What should happen?

Go deeper

1Set up a simple Kanban board for a hypothetical ongoing BA workload.
2Learn why Kanban's continuous flow fits unpredictable, incoming-request-driven work better than Scrum.
3Compare a Kanban board to a Scrum board for the same type of work.