Upstream Kanban: A Better Way to Manage Work Before It Starts
Simplify planning, prioritise efficiently, and set your team up for smoother game production with Upstream Kanban.
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Upstream Kanban streamlines task preparation by clarifying priorities and eliminating inefficiencies in the pre-production phase.
Teams reduce delays, improve workflows, and deliver engaging content faster by focusing on ideation and refining before execution.
Visual boards, clear commitment points, and actionable metrics ensure predictable updates that enhance player satisfaction.
Is your live service game team struggling with unclear priorities and overloaded workflows? Traditional Kanban systems excel at managing work that is already in progress, but what about the chaos before tasks even reach your board? Enter Upstream Kanban, a game-changing approach focusing on filtering, refining, and preparing tasks before they hit the execution phase. Upstream Kanban ensures your team works smarter, not harder, by shifting attention to where work originates.
Teams responsible for delivering new features and events are directly accountable for driving revenue through their updates. This responsibility places significant pressure on the team to deliver promptly during development. However, when you examine the entire cycle—from concept to cash—you'll often find that features perceived as being "late" experienced longer delays in the pre-production phase than during actual development.
It's essential to recognise that while game designs naturally require time to evolve as conceived and elaborated upon, the pre-production phase must be scrutinised just as closely as production if teams aim to deliver features faster. Work can stagnate or get caught in recursive loops of indecision without proper management at this early stage, leading to extended timelines and missed opportunities in the fast-paced live gaming market.
What Is Upstream Kanban?
Upstream Kanban addresses the fuzzy, early stages of work—the ideation and preparation phases where tasks are often ill-defined and priorities unclear. Think of it as a pre-production pipeline where ideas for new features, updates, and live events are vetted and prioritised. This approach separates the "what should we do?" decisions from the "how should we do it?" execution, providing a structured system for selecting high-value tasks that will engage your player base.
Key Features:
Commitment Points: Clear stages where work transitions from optional to committed, ensuring that when a new feature or event is planned, it's fully ready for development.
Refined Options: A systematic method for selecting tasks that offer the highest value to your players and the game's success.
Visualisation: Boards that make the entire process transparent to all stakeholders, including developers, designers, and live operations teams.
By focusing on these areas, teams can confidently commit to tasks, avoiding rework and wasted effort.
Why Use Upstream Kanban?
Implementing Upstream Kanban offers tangible benefits for live service game teams:
Clarity: Teams know exactly what's coming next, reducing uncertainty and enabling better planning for updates and events.
Efficiency: Only valuable, ready-to-go tasks move forward, optimising resource use and ensuring timely delivery to players.
Better Planning: Workflows remain predictable, even when priorities shift due to player feedback or market trends.
This approach reduces bottlenecks downstream and prevents teams from starting work on poorly defined tasks, leading to confusion and delays and negatively impacting the player experience.
How to Implement Upstream Kanban
Ready to make Upstream Kanban work for your team? Follow these five steps to build an effective upstream process:
1. Map the Workflow
Visualise every stage, from idea submission to development readiness. Use simple columns to represent these stages, such as "Ideas," "Refining," "Ready for Review," and "Committed." This visual representation helps everyone understand where tasks are in the pipeline, whether it's a new gameplay feature, a seasonal event, or a critical bug fix.
2. Define a Commitment Point
Establish a clear line between optional and committed work. Once a task crosses this line, it's ready for development, and the team must complete it. To ensure alignment, all stakeholders—including producers, designers, and live operations leaders—must agree on this readiness.
3. Create Explicit Policies
Set clear rules for how tasks move between stages. For example, tasks with a defined scope, player impact analysis, or stakeholder approval can leave the "Refining" stage. These policies prevent ambiguity and ensure that everyone follows the same criteria, which is essential when coordinating across multiple disciplines in game development.
4. Hold Replenishment Meetings
Regularly review the board with key players. During these meetings, decide which tasks are ready to move forward, which need more work, and which should be scrapped. This keeps the pipeline healthy and focused on high-value work that will enhance the player experience and drive engagement.
5. Watch for Diminishing Returns
Avoid over-analysing tasks. If adding more details no longer improves clarity, make a decision: commit, delay, or discard. This prevents analysis paralysis and keeps the workflow moving, ensuring players receive new content and updates as quickly as possible.
Metrics and Measurement
Measuring the effectiveness of your Upstream Kanban implementation is crucial for continuous improvement. Introducing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as lead time, cycle time, and throughput can help your team monitor progress and make data-driven decisions.
Lead Time: The total time from when a task enters the upstream process to when it is completed. Monitoring lead time helps identify bottlenecks and areas where the process can be streamlined, ensuring timely content releases.
Cycle Time: The time it takes for a task to move from one stage to the next. Keeping an eye on cycle times between stages like "Refining" and "Ready for Review" can reveal inefficiencies that might delay updates or new features.
Throughput: The number of tasks completed in a given time frame. Tracking throughput allows you to assess the team's capacity and plan accordingly, balancing the need for new content with the team's workload.
Regularly reviewing these metrics enables your team to identify patterns, adjust workloads, and optimise the upstream process for better performance—ultimately benefiting your players.
Best Practices and Tips
Successfully adopting Upstream Kanban involves more than just setting up a board; it requires a shift in mindset and collaboration. Here are some best practices to guide you:
Foster Team Collaboration: Encourage open communication among team members and stakeholders. Collaborative refinement sessions can help ensure everyone understands the tasks and their priorities, which is vital when coordinating updates that impact the live game environment.
Implement Feedback Loops: Regularly seek feedback from the team and, where possible, from player data. Use this input to make iterative improvements, keeping the system agile and responsive to player needs.
Promote Continuous Improvement: Adopt a culture of ongoing evaluation. Regular retrospectives can help the team identify what's working and what isn't, allowing adjustments to policies and workflows that enhance player satisfaction.
Limit Work in Progress (WIP): Apply WIP limits to upstream stages to prevent overload and maintain focus on the most valuable tasks. This is particularly important in live service games where overcommitment can lead to rushed features and bugs.
Use Visual Signals: Employ visual cues like colour coding or tags to highlight priority levels, task types, or blockers. This enhances transparency and aids in quick decision-making, ensuring that critical updates are prioritised.
Integrate with Downstream Processes: Ensure your upstream Kanban board is aligned with downstream activities like development sprints and release schedules. Seamless integration prevents gaps and ensures a smooth transition of tasks into execution, keeping your live game running smoothly.
Common Challenges
Transitioning to Upstream Kanban isn't without its hurdles. Teams may resist the change, pushing back against shifting focus upstream. To overcome this resistance, provide training and clear communication about the benefits to help everyone understand the value of the new approach in delivering a better player experience.
Another challenge is the risk of overcommitment; being firm about what moves past the commitment point is crucial. Rushing tasks forward without proper vetting defeats the purpose of the upstream process by reintroducing chaos into the workflow, which can result in poor-quality updates that frustrate players.
Alignment issues among stakeholders can also pose problems. All parties must agree on priorities and readiness criteria, so investing time in transparent communication early on is essential to align expectations and ensure everyone is on the same page—from game designers to live operations managers.
Benefits in Action
By implementing Upstream Kanban, you can expect to see significant improvements. Communication between teams and stakeholders becomes more effective, leading to fewer miscommunications and a more cohesive work environment. Workflows become more predictable, resulting in reliable delivery timelines and timely content releases that keep players engaged.
Additionally, focusing on completing valuable tasks rather than constantly firefighting reduces stress and burnout among team members, contributing to a healthier and more productive work atmosphere. This is especially important in the live service game sector, where teams are often under pressure to deliver continuous updates and content.
Furthermore, the use of metrics allows for data-driven improvements. By analysing KPIs like lead time and throughput, your team can identify bottlenecks and adjust processes accordingly. Incorporating best practices, such as fostering collaboration and continuous improvement, ensures that the upstream process remains efficient and effective, enhancing player satisfaction.
Upstream Kanban is an intelligent choice for teams managing high demands or complex pipelines in live service games. By tackling work upstream, you're setting your team up for smoother, more efficient workflows. It's not just about getting work done—it's about getting the right work done, the right way, ensuring your game remains engaging and competitive.
Ready to transform your workflow? Start implementing Upstream Kanban today and experience the difference it can make in your team's productivity, your game's performance, and your players' satisfaction.