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InfoQ Homepage News Tomas Rybing Introduces the Shooting Target - Value Kanban Board

Tomas Rybing Introduces the Shooting Target - Value Kanban Board

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Tomas Rybing, Director, Project Management at Aptilo Networks, introduces Value Kanban Board, based on the shooting target concept, in his recent blog. He explains three ways of using the shooting target in kanban teams.

Shooting targets are mostly used in competitive shooting sports. The simplest and most commonly known variant of a shooting target is the one that goes from 1 to 10 points. Where 1 point is the lowest score in the outmost biggest circle, and 10 points is the highest score in the little center circle.

Tomas uses the shooting target visualization techniques in the kanban board for multiple teams as shown below:

Tomas says that in this kanban board with the visualization of the shooting target it is easy to see the work that is close to be finished, since it is closest to the middle. Just started work is out in the periphery. Therefore, the first application of shooting target is focused on the kanban principle - stop starting and start finishing.

Another application of shooting target is to calculate team scores. Tomas says that if we assign different scores to each circle, based on the number of stickies in each circle, team score can be calculated.

The discussions should not be around the exact team scores, but to trigger information to the team (”We have a high score, meaning we will soon run out of work, we better do something about it”). The ”perfect score” to aim for will be within a range (between X and Y). The team will have to experiment to find this out. I guess this ”team score” can also work as a sort of WIP limit.

Third application of the shooting target is value calculation proposed by Tomas. For this, teams decide a few parameters, for instance business value and customer value, with scores and their weighted values. Then team can rank their features using these variables and visualize them on a ”shooting target” (score from 1 to 10).

Tomas mentions that these visualisation techniques can also be used for one team in their regular kanban board.

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