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Criterion
Paper illustration of a four-column Kanban board with limited ongoing work, a visible blocker and a review loop.
Engineering
Kanban
Value Stream Mapping workspace showing the question, observations, and next decision.
Delivery
Value Stream Mapping
Paper illustration for Bucket System.
Agile
Bucket System
Paper illustration for Affinity Estimation.
Agile
Affinity Estimation
Purposedifferent
When work sits in too many parallel streams, throughput suffers and no one sees the bottlenecks. Kanban makes the flow of work visible and limits overload so a system becomes calmer and more predictable.When delivery work dissolves into wait times, handoffs, and hidden effort, Value Stream Mapping makes the actual flow visible. The method exposes bottlenecks, idle time, and feedback loops so lead time and improvement levers become tangible.When a large batch of work needs a fast, rough estimate, it sorts items into predefined size buckets. It sorts work by value, risk, and delivery ability. The result is captured as a Bucketed Backlog, Relative Estimates, and Split Candidates.When many tasks need to be classified quickly, it sorts them by perceived effort and similarity. It reduces the effort of fine-grained estimation for large volumes.
Complexitysame
MediumMediumMediumMedium
Timedifferent
Ongoing1-3 h30-90 min30-90 min
Participantsdifferent
2-124-103-123-12
Formatdifferent
Workshop + asyncWorkshopWorkshopWorkshop
Outputdifferent
Kanban board, WIP policies, Flow metricsCurrent-state map, Future-state map, Bottleneck listBucketed Backlog, Relative Estimates, Split CandidatesAffinity Size Map, Grouped Estimates, Unclear Items
Tagsno overlap
FlowVisual managementDelivery
LeanFlowWasteDelivery
EstimationBacklogRelative sizing
EstimationBacklogRelative sizing
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