How do you know when to clean up your kanban’s Done column? When it’s full.

When we showed our board to people in classes and on consulting engagements, the Done column showed that we were really, really productive. It was huge. It went on forever. Hundreds of completed tasks.

So, how do we clean up our Done column?

Retrospective

Every Friday we meet and discuss what we’ve been doing and move the tickets from Done into an Archive column. For a physical personal kanban, this might be a box or a folder. We discuss what we did and how things went, focusing on areas of improvement.

But what happens if you are on the road for four weeks straight and you can’t have a retrospective? This was happening a lot for us.

Not everything needs to be discussed

Recently we’ve discovered that by focusing on one or two main projects at a time, the retrospectives change considerably. We set up tactical boards for daily work and focus on that work. We are constantly asking ourselves what needs to be done, how our process is working, and what the best thing is to do next.

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