I’ve been doing Kanban for a while now, and I get the following question almost on a daily basis: Zsolt, can I move this item back on the board? My answer always starts with “No”, and continues with “why would you like to do that?” In this post, I’m going to describe a couple of cases you may find familiar. A common rule applies in every case: never move an item back, but examine why a particular item is selected, and how to avoid such situations in the future.
In most common cases, the question is asked when a column on the Kanban board is full, and a colleague intends to put a new item in the column, but due to the WIP limit, he can not. After realizing that the column is full, he looks through the current content and finds some items he would like to move back. He finds abandoned items in which the team invested only a small amount of work, and are now just there and taking up valuable space from other items. In the ageing items post, I talked about items which were left on the whiteboard for similar reasons.
Let’s have two different teams. The first team has a 8-10 days long lead time, but their priorities are changing almost on a daily basis, and the second team has a 2-3 days long lead time, and a quite stable priority list. In the case of the first team, the appearance of the abandoned items will be more frequent due to priority changes and resource reallocation. I would recommend them to find a way to shorten the lead time. If an item can leave the system before the priority changes again, it won’t be left on the board. In comparison, this team needs to solve the situation faster than the second team, because the abandoned item was once important for someone, who won’t be happy to get his item quite late or in the worst case, never. However, when it turns out that the item has become obsolete, just throw it away, do not waste effort on finishing it.
