In our company, we're currently trying to get started with Kanban. When discussing about how to handle the different work items / user stories / tasks, this question came up:
How do you effectively handle different activities in Kanban?
For example, I don't have to work for only one project. There are also other tasks I have to do (participating in special work-group meetings, client training some days, etc.). All members of our team are still involved in other activities that are completely independent of the actual project we're working on.
As Kanban is an evolutionary approach, we think there should be a "smooth" migration, meaning that we don't want to force all the team members to stop participating in other working groups.
Our possible approaches are:
Include other activities as tasks on the Kanban board.
Problem: most of the other activities, like training or meetings, are fixed in time. When other work isn't finished, starting those "non-project" activities would break the Kanban Limit, but allowing this, would not require us to include them in our Kanban process.
Ignore non-project activities in the Kanban process.
Hopefully there's a better approach.
Create a second board for those other activities.
Problem: How do you control the WIP-limits?
How can we handle this these different activities with Kanban?