If your board says To Do / Doing / Done, your metrics are already compromised.
They are not just slightly off, and "good enough for now” is not good enough at all. Your metrics are actively misleading you.
And before you blame your tools, this isn't a tooling problem, it's a thinking problem.

Most delivery organisations don’t lack data. In fact they swim in data.

What they lack is understanding what to do with the data. To quote Douglas Hubbard "we should care about a measurement because it informs key decisions”​

But it is rare to come across an organisation that understands well why they measure in the first place.

If there is one Kanban idea that organisations love to talk about and hate to actually practice, it’s this one.

Pull-based WIP control. Everyone you meet who knows Kanban is also an expert in WIP.

The most common question delivery teams are typically asked is also the most damaging one:


“When will it be done?”


Not because the question is unreasonable, customers are absolutely entitled to ask, but because most organisations answer it in a way that guarantees disappointment. Dates get guessed, confidence gets projected, risks get accepted and uncertainty gets quietly ignored until it turns into high profile failure. Yes, an estimate is better than no estimate but estimates turn into commitments and that only leads to problems.

After coming across the same situation a few times, I decided it’s time to write about an approach to software delivery team structure that we have used with great success at a major government organisation around 2018-2021. Since then I have worked with three other organisations that seem to suffer from the very same problem - they find it difficult or slow to execute delivery of features or product increments where there are multiple teams involved in the end to end implementation.

If you know something about Kanban and perhaps a little bit about Portfolio Kanban, you may be aware of the need to know and display two signals for your epics that will help you manage your flow of work better.