Making Policies Explicit

This practice from the Kanban Method might seem trivial to you, but it is very powerful. In our corporate day-to-day, there are many rules people are unsure about or don't know if they apply in certain situations. Making the rules of the game more straightforward for everyone has tremendous power.

November/02/2022 - 5 minutes reading

Often, policies already exist, but sometimes they are implicit, so only a few people actually follow them. Additionally, new members of a company or team take a bit longer to learn the implicit rules of the environment.

Making policies explicit yields even more significant results when applied alongside other Kanban practices. If policies are explicit and easy to see, the benefits increase even more. Suppose your company manages workflow and makes all the workflow rules explicit and visible. In that case, the workflows will be validated and improved much faster, and your company will gain a lot of efficiency. When limiting parallel work, it is crucial that the limit is explicit and that visual cues help in management. This way, all Kanban practices complement each other, and your overall management improves.

Another way to understand this Kanban practice is by comparing it with Scrum, XP, and other methodologies. In Scrum, for example, it's common for people to clearly define when a task or user story is ready to enter the Sprint and when to consider the task or user story completed. These are policies that should be explicit for everyone. However, they only cover the beginning and end of the flow. In Kanban, you can also make mid-flow definitions explicit.

It's also valuable to clarify guidelines for handling blockers and dependencies that the team faces, whether from within the company or even from external sources. It's essential to consider the degree of the team's influence over these dependencies and make it clear to everyone how to deal with them.

Another technique for making policies explicit is managing urgencies and different levels of expectations and risks we face in our work. Make these rules clear as well.

With clear rules, the benefits are seen in quicker decision-making without the need for many questions or alignments. When people know the game's rules, they make more decisions independently and need less help. Teams become more self-organized or self-managed. Leaders can influence more people. Teams can grow larger. Consequently, companies achieve more.

Use this practice responsibly, as creating too many policies and overwhelming people with information will have the opposite effect. It will increase bureaucracy, slow down teams, and make managing the workflow more tedious.

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