Hi Paul,
I reached out to our Client Exec who set up a call with someone on their product team.
Their primary suggestion is to create one or several long iterations (a month or even a year) which become your Work In Progress. You can then use the backlog to intake, sort and prioritize work and then just move it to the iteration once you have capacity. You can create custom statuses to represent the stories/tasks which are ready to start, new, in progress, etc. or for whichever buckets of work you choose.
They also suggested creating a report to monitor the items moved to the Work In Progress (iteration) to show which work buckets/statuses have capacity, so you know when new items can be added from the backlog.
Having tried this, the biggest issue I see for our team is that as soon as you move a task to an iteration, Workfront automatically changes the Planned Completion Date of that task to the end date of the iteration (and this is unchangeable). If your team works independently and completely in Agile, this may not be a problem. However, tasks assigned to our team may originate from a larger Waterfall style project, meaning the PM's view when looking at the Waterfall workback schedule will show planned completion dates which would fall way outside of the project's actual required dates.
In speaking with Workfront, they did have a few suggestions to work around this (e.g. adding a custom due date field to each task as a visual for the real date; creating two tasks -- an Agile task and a traditional task, where the resolution of the traditional task is tied to the completion of the Agile task; creating an iteration for every project and setting the iteration end date as the project's planned end date).
Ultimately, we've decided that we're going to have to start out using Scrum, or at least working in shorter iterations, until Workfront develops Kanban support (which I understand is in the plans, albeit not immediate plans).
Let me know if you have any suggestions or if you've tried things that worked out! We are still interested in pursuing Kanban at some point.
Thanks, Barb
