How can Kanban handle team interuptions

Our engineering department has to answer to a lot of different parts of the organization  With an existing product with multiple versions released into the field, the obvious problems of developer support of issues and qa handling of  hot fix releases comes into play.  These are all things that come up at any time…they are not planned.

So the big question is “How do we set our Kanban SLA’s when we could get called off to support the existing product at any time?”

And the answer is…”Set your SLA to account for a normal level of distraction.”

This is a tough part to accept.  What we want to do, ideally, is set an SLA to be the time period that we would want to accomplish the work in:  ”That will take 6 hours of effort”.  The problem is that  6 hours of effort is spread over 2 days.

OK.  So we say that 2 days is a reasonable amount of time to accomplish the task.  If we want to get that down to 1 day, we can look at why all those distractions that are occuring and figure out a way to fix it (Kaizen!).    If the distraction rises to the level that it takes 3 days to finish the effort, then we need to look at why support efforts are digging into development time (Kaizen!).

Kanban work looks to when a thing can be accomplished, not the actual effort to accomplish.  If the work takes longer than expected, it becomes a learning opportunity on where there may be inefficiencies in the existing workflow.  If you want to shorten the time to accomplish, that’s also  a learning opportunity.