Free tools · Elle Anderson · andersonco.ukThe Flow Health Check
Ten checks that reveal whether your board is telling the truth. Tick what is true today, not what the process document says. Run it with the whole team in fifteen minutes, then argue about the gaps. Companion to my field note, Your kanban board is lying to you.
Waiting disguised as working
Wait states are visible. Blocked and waiting work is tagged or has its own lane, it does not sit in "In progress" looking busy.Ask: pick any in-progress ticket. What happened on it yesterday? If the honest answer is "waited", it wasn't in progress.
We know our flow efficiency, even roughly. We can say what share of cycle time is active work versus waiting.Ask: is the number under 40 percent? For most teams it is. That is normal, and it is also the biggest lever you have.
Dependencies on other teams are visible on our board, not just in someone's head or a Slack thread.
Work that never boards
Production support, incidents and "quick favours" go on the board, however small.Ask: what did each person do this week that appears nowhere? That is your invisible capacity leak.
The board reflects true capacity. Nobody is secretly on two boards, half-allocated, or covering for a vacancy the board doesn't know about.
WIP limits exist, are visible, and stopped something recently. A limit that has never been hit is a decoration.
Columns describing hand-offs, not value
Columns describe progress toward customer value, not our org chart. "Dev, Code review, QA, Deploy" is a diagram of hand-offs, and every boundary is a queue.
Done means in customers' hands, or the column says what it really means.Ask: how many "done" items from last month have no customer using them yet?
Cycle time is measured from commitment to customer, not from "picked up" to "merged".
The board starts arguments. Someone was made usefully uncomfortable by it in the last month. A board that never embarrasses anyone is decorative.