Last year I discussed the need to prioritise in choosing what to develop in a personal kanban. This is the initial step and requires you to decide on your 'mission statement' or 'organisational goals' (be it team or solo).
Beyond that is a need to coordinate, and to eliminate 'memory leaks' as I call them (wherein an idea leaks out of the pipeline regardless of any notion of priority). To put it another way, priority isn't something a project can intrinsically possess, it's an active process.
The first thing I want to highlight is that kanban is a process that can fail: the product can have defects, even show stopping ones.
Again I'm going to draw an analogy to cooking: most people don't cook without a recipe. If we do, and we're at all proud of our work, we probably have a recipe memorised in sufficient detail that we could write one if prompted.
Like code, food defects can be attributed to runtime causes (timing, equipment/ingredient fit/quality) if those characteristics are explicitly formulated.
A recipe can fail if it's vague on details, and all the more so for complex tasks. Ambiguity's freedom leaves us open to defects. I liken the ambiguity to code that is untyped (e.g. the type of utensil used to turn your eggs can be left to user preference, but some will tear an omelette more easily).
This is something you can feel while performing the operations, but may not be able to attribute without experience: having experimented with different utensil 'stacks', cooked with other teams, or watched cookery shows (tech demos of the chef world).
What if a recipe's goal was to generalise to any chef's ‘stack’, expressly to avoid defects?
This is the motivation to define SOPs for GitHub Projects: to demonstrate how I use it firstly, but moreover not just to express an opinion on best practices but to contextualise these choices with ergonomic considerations as introduced in the previous section.
This post is part of GitHub Projects SOP, a series covering how I use the GitHub Projects kanban tool for tracking my personal development and ensuring this works in practice. Read on for part 2, discussing ?