There are quite a few vendors developing Kanban tools and we users can expect to have lots of choice of tooling by late autumn 2009. To make sure that these prospective tool vendors create a tool that will deliver true Kanban functionality, I thought I’d create a product backlog for them containing some of the non-obvious features that we will all need. It’s so easy to get caught in the notion that Kanban is just about colored cards on a board and as we know it is about a whole lot more than that.

  1. Flexibility in workflow design
  2. Flexibility in reporting
  3. Canned reports should include cumulative flow & cycle time spectral analysis and both should allow defined start and end dates and shouldn’t be tied to releases
  4. WIP Limits across steps in the workflow
  5. WIP Limit over-ride with audit trail
  6. Swim lane support
  7. Colored card support
  8. Decorate cards with icons
  9. Hierarchical work item / card support with two tiered display. Ideally, hierarchy should be deeper then 2 levels, to support existing processes such as FDD with hierarchical backlogs.
  10. Allow swim lanes to be assigned to hierarchical support, class of service or work item type
  11. Allow color to be assigned to class or service or work item type
  12. Allow icon decoration to be assigned to class of service or work item type
  13. Allow person cards to be stacked on work cards
  14. Support for target cycle time per class or service and status reporting on due date performance and likelihood of due date achievement – highlighting of time remaining or time expired
  15. Allocation of WIP limits across swiml anes and colors of cards i.e. allocation of WIP limits across classes of service and work item types
  16. WIP limits on two tiered hierarchies

Nice to have features

  1. Support for SPC charts on WIP, velocity and cycle time
  2. Animated replay
  3. Enforced class of service pull policies i.e. system should highlight which item should be pulled next
  4. Simulation – ability to predict which release a particular card will be delivered in
  5. Canned report for daily-delta, showing what changed since yesterday
  6. Ability to host multiple boards, representing different teams on different projects sharing product level goals i.e. a program rolling up together with some dependent integration
  7. On-screen policy definitions, configurable by project/initiative/value-stream describing rules and classes of service

Please comment and suggest other features I have overlooked.