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My team has recently changed from Scrum to a Kanban like setup. We switched because our plans in Scrums were always spoiled by external initiatives. Now we do day to day planning instead.
We pull items from a large backlog, have a WIP limit set on in progress items etc, but sometimes new "emergency" work appears. How should we handle this in Kanban?
The most common approach I've seen is to create an emergency swim lane at the bottom of the board. This swim lane is not subject to the same WIP limits and takes priority over the other work. This way we keep the work visible. However, when you track metrics like lead time and cycle time, consider these items separately. That way you'll see the impact that the volume of emergency work has on the lead time and cycle time or planned work.
Having an emergency lane with the WIP limit one is a good approach as Daniel mentioned, or you can introduce different classes for your work items, and prioritize your work in your columns accordingly.
In your cause the class will be the severity, and the unplanned card enters with the highest severity, therefore will the first in each column (in Kanban you can always prioritize your internal columns). When somebody is ready to pull, they will pull the important unplanned card, which is on the top.
When the emergency level of the said work item increases, the team can decide to stop the work, and pull the item. In cases like this you can break the WIP limit. It is recommended to talk about why it was necessary, and how come nobody saw this work coming in the spirit of continuous improvement. We used this approach in a project and the number of unplanned cards went from 6/week to 2/week. (This article which goes into more details on the prioritization I mentioned before.)
If the "emergency" work means just unplanned work, create only two categories planned and unplanned, and measure each week their ratio, and like in the other case, discuss how come that nobody saw the unplanned work coming.
One simple approach is to enforce a limit on WIP items. An emergency item that comes in, forces a planned item to go back out. It stays out until the emergency item remains in progress.
We follow this internally and initially it used to be hard to have that rigor but now we have built that constraint into board itself, so it forces you to move an item out to create an "empty slot" where you can bring in an emergency item. Theoretically this also limits # of emergency items we could be tackling it at any time, but practically we have not approached that limit, so it works fine.
Like the above posters mention, classes in combination with an emergency or express swim lane are the most common solutions. You're looking for several important behaviors from the team that go beyond the basic Kanban board tools however:
