Using a kanban system to track editorial work

 

With close to a thousand bits of short and long-form content to produce, the @GovUK project is a big editorial project, not just a development gig. Spreadsheets are making us cross-eyed and can be crippling so we are experimenting with a Kanban wall to prioritise and track work.

The idea is that you map the workflow stages of a process (in our case editorial) and limit the amount you prioritise, the amount of work in progress and keep moving tickets from left to right.

I like this way of working a lot. We're running this process alongside our sprint wall which focuses on the development tasks and we track completed items on a weekly basis. Bottlenecks become apparent as tasks pile up in one column or another.  It's a simple way of focusing on the task in hand and gives us tickets to point at in our daily stand-ups.

Early days yet but early signs are that it's helping.