We decided to try Kanban project management system as a fast and easy way to visualize the flow of projects and tasks for development. But before that we had to figure out what a project exactly was and what its life cycle looked like as well as determine what stage each project was on.

We made developers responsible for the overall life cycle of every task, from its first appearance in the development queue and until the deployment brings actual value. It made the development cycle longer as before that developers’ work finished with the completion of engineering documentation. But at the same time it let the developers see the practical usefulness of every project as well as their own contribution to the overall success and gave a clear idea of who would provide the support if needed.

After that we made a kanban board with all the projects and saw the real state of development: The amount of work was thrice as much as we could actually do. Besides we identified what stages caused projects to get stuck. By prioritizing, limiting the project flow and using simple rules we managed to achieve a proper balance between development and delivery time, started to build relationships with our clients and got a deeper understanding of what was going on inside every project.