Are Kanban Boards Preventing Your Success?
Kanban, an agile methodology and Kanban boards, are increasingly being used to manage projects. One reason for this is that project management systems based on the Kanban methodology like for example Trello have become very popular over the last decade, so popular in fact that now most office workers are familiar with Kanban boards.
While Kanban boards seem to increase productivity on the first look, on the second look they actually decrease productivity. The reasons for this decrease mainly has to do with the inability to relate one the one hand tasks to bigger projects, and on the other hand related tasks to subtasks.
This relationship between project, task and subtasks level is represented in a goal pyramid.
A Goal pyramid has the project objective at the top, then spits this into tasks, and the tasks into actionable subtasks. Such a goal pyramid has two big advantages:
● People know the why behind a tasks and how tasks related together to accomplish the bigger project
● People know how to executive a task but splitting it into subtasks
Below we discuss the importance of goal pyramids, why Kanban is unable to incorporate them and the consequences of the lack of goal pyramids.
1. Importance of Goal Pyramids
A goal pyramid is a structure that links:
● your top level goals to your main projects needed to accomplish these goals, and
● these projects to your tasks needed to accomplish these projects, and
● the tasks to your actionable subtasks needed to accomplish these tasks.
For example, let's imagine that you want to become a lawyer and you are studying in law school. In order to become a lawyer you need to get a law degree. And in order to get the law degree you need to pass all your classes. And in order to pass your classes you need to pass the exams in those classes. And in order to pass those exams you need to study. So the high level goal of becoming a lawyer can be achieved by studying. Your studying will lead you to pass the exams, which will lead you to pass the classes, which will lead you to get a law degree.
A goal pyramid answers two questions:
- Why should I do a task?
- How should I do a task?
Also, a goal pyramid makes it possible to have a list of several hundred actionable subtasks without feeling overwhelmed, as all of them are related to big tasks and projects.
2. Structured Task List
Goal pyramids in the form of an actual pyramid are not very convenient for everyday use. This is because if you split your top level goals to the lowest level actionable tasks, you will naturally arrive at thousands of tasks, which are impossible to write in the form of a pyramid. Therefore, the best way to write down a goal pyramid structure, relating each actionable task to project and project to ultimate goals, is via a structured task list.
You can see one of these here:
As you can see above each big task or project has subcomponents, i.e. tasks, and those tasks have subtasks.
3. Impossibility of Structured Tasks Lists with Kanban Boards
Kanban boards have many advantages:
● Help a team visualize the status of tasks
● See what team members are working on
● Limit the number of tasks that are in progress
However, the big disadvantage of Kanban boards is that it is impossible to construct a structured task list.
Why is it not possible to have a structured task list? Imagine a Kanban board with three columns:
● To-do
● In progress
● Done
As we can see some of the tasks are large projects (yellow), while others are lower level tasks (orange) and still others are subtasks (red). It is impossible to relate the tasks to each other, as in a structured task list.
Imagine that we were to have a structured task list, as shown above, in the to-do column. Now if we were working on a task or subtask we would have to move it into the ¨in progress¨ column. But by moving it into that column we are either moving it out of the structured task list or we would have to recreate the structured task list in every column, in order to keep the association with the upper and lower levels. So for every subtask we move we would also have to move the related tasks. That would become very messy.
In order to be able to have the associations in a structured task list we need to limit us to one column only, and therefore put the task status not as different columns but as attributes of a task. That way we can get the advantages of Kanban without having the drawbacks of not being able to have a goal pyramid.
4. Negative Consequences of the Absences of Goal Pyramids in Kanban Boards
Since Kanban boards do not allow structured task lists, teams working with Kanban boards face the following disadvantages:
4.1. No task-project-goal coherence
The primary problem of not having the possibility to visualize goal pyramids is that teams lack the clarity on how small tasks are related to the bigger goals (the why question) and how bigger goals split into smaller tasks (the how question).
4.2. Only big projects without actionable tasks
Without goal pyramids, teams working with Kanban often only visualize the big tasks, without splitting them into subtasks. For example, the team might only list things like:
● ¨finished website¨
● ¨launch a new product¨,
but without listing the tasks required for the projects.
The problem with this is that the team will not have a clear plan on what tasks need to be done for the accomplishment of the big goal.
Also, only having big goals means that often even though the vast majority of tasks and subtasks would be finished and thus have a status of ¨done¨ the project level task would still be ¨in progress¨ without reflecting the ¨done¨ tasks. This is bad for two reasons:
● First, it is demotivational.
● Second, the project level task stays within work in progress, which according to Kanban means that progress on other tasks is blocked.
4.3. Only small tasks
Without goal pyramids, some teams working with Kanban boards visualize every little task. So the team would list tasks like, ¨call the client for a customer interview¨, ¨write an email to the PR agency¨ etc. The problem with this is that the overall goal for why these tasks are important and how these tasks related to each other is missing.
Also, while small tasks will be moving quickly from the to-do to done, often no significant progress will be made as the larger projects are not advancing as only small tasks are being accomplished. In fact, it might be the case that many different projects are open and are work-in-progress but none is getting closed as the only work-in-progress that is being visualised is the one of small tasks.
4.4. Different level goals
Many teams working with Kanban boards will be inconsistent in terms of the level of task that they put into the system. Some of the tasks will be low level tasks like: “call clients for customer interviews”, “write an email to the PR agency” while others will be a high level task like “finishing the website”, or “launching a new product as a project”.
This has both of the above mentioned problems and in addition dissociates the task from the projects they belong to and vice versa.
In summary, a goal pyramid structure in the form of a structured list of tasks is important and helps to achieve project success in many ways. Kanban does not allow this and therefore runs into many problems. To avoid these problems, you should not be using a Kanban board.
5. How to Get All the Advantages of Kanban Without the Drawbacks?
As we have explained above there are many advantages to Kanban boards.
However, the lack of structuring work into coherent goals, and related projects, tasks and subtasks is a huge drawback.
Project management software that does not use Kanban, potentially implement a goal pyramid, but none of the major systems have done it. For that reason we developed a focus tool that enables Kanban like planning but also has the goal pyramid as an important component. This software is called Workiamo. As you are reading this article, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK
