Kanban for Documentation Products

At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) we handled training courses that lasted many weeks and included thousands of pages of written materials. These included not only slide decks, handouts, instructor guides, and student guides but also innumerable project-related materials for use during exercises, not to mention lists of online resources. We managed seven courses, most in-person but some E-learning, and some blended. It was a lot.

For years, the courses were updated one at a time. This meant that when Federal or DHS policy changed, a course would languish with old content, sometimes for as long as eight years, frustrating instructors and students alike. By implementing a Kanban approach, I was able to shift to updating all the courses at once, focusing just on the little bits that were affected by policy changes.

In case you don’t know about Kanban - it is a way to visualize work and make it easier to track and manage. Work is broken down into the smallest pieces possible, elements that can be tackled and finished within a few days or a week at most. You can call work items whatever you want - the most common terms are tickets or cards. These are tracked on a board, which can be physical:

source: https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Kanban_board

Or virtual:

Many workflows are more complex, and engineering teams add other kinds of columns. In order to visualize our instructional design workflow, we needed more columns too. Each lesson went through a subject matter expert (SME) review, a peer review from another designer, and a final review by our DHS manager, the client. It evolved next to something like this:

Kanban boards are super flexible! 🎉 You can change them however you want and need. For example, when stuck we would write “Blocked” on the card but we noticed that we couldn’t easily see which cards were blocked. Eventually we added a column called “Blocked” and the reason the item was blocked was written on the card.

If you choose to use a tracking tool like Jira, you can get really creative, and add things like labels and level of effort to each card. For our instructional design needs, we had labels such as: Instructor guide, Slides, Admin (for housekeeping tasks), Design (for graphic art and infographics), and Guest Speaker.

The other neat thing about Jira and other tracking tools is the ability to measure how long it takes to complete a ticket. This can be important, because the data eventually can help you answer questions such as, “how long will this take to complete?”

If you are just getting started, here is my advice. Get together with your working group or team, and choose a tool (tape and stickies on the wall, something lightweight like Trello, or a project management tool like Jira or Airtable) and decide on your columns. Create a few cards, and just start playing with it. Don’t worry about all the advanced Kanban concepts, just try it out for a week or two, then get together and discuss. Follow your instincts and curiosity, and grow your tool kit and practices over time. Don’t be afraid to fail or do things the wrong way - there is no wrong way! Do what works for you, and let us know how it goes.

Above all, have some fun! 😜