FREE KANBAN AND WORKFLOW LEARNING PATH

WikiFree original practice workbook

The flow room

CASE STATUS: fictional/synthetic teaching material. Do not present the example as real research, employment experience or measured business performance.

OUTCOME
Design a small pull-based workflow, apply work-in-progress limits and use cycle-time evidence to improve one bottleneck.

BEFORE YOU START
Basic spreadsheet use or paper cards; Trello is an optional interface.

CASE
Juniper Studio receives design requests. Today three items are in production and one waits for review. The team wants shorter and more predictable completion, not the fullest board. Treat the times below as a small synthetic sample.

INPUTS
Request,"Work time, days","Queue time, days"
Poster,2,4
Flyer,1,2
Banner,3,5
Icon set,2,3
Event card,1,4


ENTRY CHECK

Question: Does moving a card prove the work is done?

Self-check: No. The exit policy and evidence determine completion.

Question: What happens when review is full?

Self-check: Help clear review or address the blockage before pulling more production work.

Question: Is the average a delivery promise?

Self-check: No. It summarizes this sample and hides variation.

STAGE 1: Map the actual workflow

Prerequisite: Basic spreadsheet use or paper cards; Trello is an optional interface.

Instruction: Map the states work really passes through, including waiting. A board with only to do and done may hide the review queue. Write a clear start and finish boundary before measuring elapsed time. Keep an explicit blocked marker without pretending a blocked item has left work in progress. A digital board is optional; policies make the system useful.

Practice task: Draw Requested, Ready, Doing, Review and Done. For each transition, specify the evidence or decision that permits it.

Deliverable: A workflow and five transition policies

Acceptance check: A reviewer can place a new request in one unambiguous state.

If stuck: If cards frequently jump states, check whether the board reflects the real process.

Record your work, decisions and evidence:




Record your result against the acceptance check:



STAGE 2: Make pull policies explicit

Prerequisite: Bring your previous output: A workflow and five transition policies

Instruction: A work-in-progress limit constrains started but unfinished work. It is a signal to collaborate and finish, not a quota to make people look busy. Different states can have different limits. Decide how urgent work is recognized and who may change its priority; otherwise every requester can bypass the policy by writing urgent.

Practice task: Set Doing to three and Review to one. Introduce a new urgent banner while both are full, then write the response without silently breaking the limits.

Deliverable: A pull policy and urgent-work rule

Acceptance check: The response identifies a finishing or explicit reprioritization action, not an invisible extra slot.

If stuck: If limits are routinely ignored, reduce intake or address the bottleneck before changing the number.

Record your work, decisions and evidence:




Record your result against the acceptance check:



STAGE 3: Measure elapsed time

Prerequisite: Bring your previous output: A pull policy and urgent-work rule

Instruction: Cycle time is meaningful only with defined boundaries. In this case, elapsed time from Doing to Done equals work time plus queue time. Keep both components because improving productive effort will not necessarily fix a waiting problem. Use the median alongside the range. Five observations can start a discussion but cannot establish a reliable long-term service-level forecast.

Practice task: Calculate each elapsed time, the median, the minimum and maximum. Compare total work time with total queue time and identify the larger component.

Deliverable: A cycle-time summary with boundaries

Acceptance check: Results are 6, 3, 8, 5 and 5 days; median 5 and range 3–8.

If stuck: If numbers differ, check whether waiting was excluded or the median was calculated before sorting.

Record your work, decisions and evidence:




Record your result against the acceptance check:



STAGE 4: Investigate a blockage

Prerequisite: Bring your previous output: A cycle-time summary with boundaries

Instruction: A blocked card needs a reason, an owner for the next action and a review time. Those fields help the team act; they should not become a surveillance record. In Juniper, review waits because only one reviewer knows the brand rules. Consider making those rules visible and pairing on reviews. Automating card movement will not remove the knowledge constraint.

Practice task: Write a blocked-card policy and a reviewer handoff checklist. Compare a second-reviewer experiment with an automation-only proposal.

Deliverable: A blockage response and handoff checklist

Acceptance check: The intervention addresses the cause of waiting and preserves an accountable next action.

If stuck: If the proposed fix is a tool purchase, first explain which observed delay it removes.

Record your work, decisions and evidence:




Record your result against the acceptance check:



STAGE 5: Run one improvement experiment

Prerequisite: Bring your previous output: A blockage response and handoff checklist

Instruction: Change one policy and observe its effect over a defined window. A shorter cycle time accompanied by more rework may not be an improvement. Choose a primary flow measure and a balancing measure. Keep the original data so that later comparisons remain interpretable. Do not claim causality from a tiny before-and-after sample.

Practice task: Plan a two-week paired-review experiment. Record cycle time, rework count and a decision threshold for retaining or changing the policy.

Deliverable: A two-week experiment charter

Acceptance check: The plan names a comparison method and a balancing measure, with no guaranteed result.

If stuck: If several policies change together, simplify the experiment or state that attribution will be uncertain.

Record your work, decisions and evidence:




Record your result against the acceptance check:



WORKED CASE
The five items total 27 elapsed days: 9 work days and 18 queue days. Waiting therefore represents two-thirds of observed elapsed time. This makes review delay a reasonable investigation target, not proof that every future request should finish in five days.

FINAL PROJECT
Build the Juniper workflow playbook with a board, pull and blocked-item policies, a worked flow summary and a measured improvement experiment.

REQUIRED CRITICAL CHECK
Do not remove blocked work from WIP counts or turn a five-item median into a guaranteed deadline.

SCORING
Score each of the five stage acceptance checks from 0–16 (0 missing/incorrect; 8 partially supported; 16 complete and evidenced). Score the final integrated project from 0–20 (0 missing; 10 incomplete handover; 20 complete, reproducible and consistent with the case). Target: at least 80/100 AND the critical check must pass. A total score never overrides a failed critical check.

SCOPE LIMIT
This route covers a small service workflow, not a full Kanban certification or enterprise portfolio system.

SOURCES AND ACCESS
The videos are free. Complete all assessed work on paper or in a spreadsheet; a Trello account and paid automation features are not required.

Trello Project Management: Free Course
WikiFree: https://wikifree.com/courses/free-learn-skills-daily-trello-project-management/
Official source: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoyECfvEFOjYb43VO1YDWJsdOVdkyt_lZ
Why selected: The beginner tutorial provides a concrete board interface; the later selection helps translate the written policies into a practical board.

Stage 1 selected lessons:

1. Trello Beginner Tutorial (27:07)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCxm2bJi114&list=PLoyECfvEFOjYb43VO1YDWJsdOVdkyt_lZ&index=3

Stage 4 selected lessons:

2. Trello Intermediate Tutorial (39:25)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQHF91sC9Ng&list=PLoyECfvEFOjYb43VO1YDWJsdOVdkyt_lZ&index=2

REUSE
Original WikiFree teaching text and synthetic fixtures are supplied for personal learning and adaptation with attribution. Provider lessons remain on their original sites and retain their own terms. No provider certificate is included.