At work we use a kanban process to manage our small change requests with the development team. These requests are pretty much a 50:50 split between new features and defects. We have always used about 15% of our resource to do these requests, but have we only really made any progress once we had a dedicated manager (me!) running the process and dedicated developers doing the work [let's face it, it's the developers who made the difference]. The team is known as the BAU team, and the developers work on it for a 2 week stint and everybody gets to have a go. This has good points and bad points and I’m still not sure where I am with this. On the good side, it is a great way to spread knowledge through the wider team as the BAU team work on every part of our systems; but as the developers only work on it for a couple of weeks you don’t really have time to build a team that is self organised and committed to a goal. Having said that, the team have delivered some great pieces of work and I think they have enjoyed the experience overall.

Anyway, the “BAU” name is pretty dull and undersells both the value of the work that the team does and it’s complexity so we’ve decided to rename them the Rapid Response Team. I have even done a logo!

Apologies in advance to our entire Design team and anybody with a modicum of taste for the abomination that am I about to release on the world. I did maths at Uni and I absolutely hated art having realised at an early age that I completely suck at it.

Anyway…