Kanban 007

If you work in an organization where you have some autonomy on the project you're managing it's okay to go ahead and implement kanban right in the middle of it.  I did it for a QA project I was managing.  Even though I didn't have any management authority over the development team (different contractor) I implemented kanban for the QA team within the boundaries under my team's control.  Eventually we were able to let the developers in on what we were doing because they noticed an improvement in the overall process.  WIP was limited without much fanfare--we just let the developers know that we couldn't do everything they were asking us to do in the amount of time they wanted us to do it and be able to promise the really good work we were doing.   We made sure that they understood our commitment to them and the quality of the work we were going to give them. We asked them if we could have shorter releases because it made it easier for the QA team to provide support to the developers and allowed both teams (which were becoming one team) to focus on the tasks that provided immediate value to the users.  This had the effect of balancing demand against throughput.