I'm a marketing manager trying to apply Kanban to our creative workflow. We have regular social media posts, but then we have massive "Fire Drill" requests from the sales team. How do I categorize these using "Classes of Service"? Should I use different colors, or rows, and how do I prevent the urgent stuff from completely killing our planned long-term strategy work?
3 answers
In marketing, Classes of Service are vital. Typically, you should have four: 1. Expedite (Critical, must be done now), 2. Fixed Delivery Date (Campaigns tied to an event), 3. Standard (Your regular SEO/Social work), and 4. Intangible (Long-term brand building). The secret is to limit the "Expedite" lane to only one card at a time. If sales tries to push two "urgent" things, they have to choose which one is truly the priority. This protects your Standard and Intangible work from being constantly sidelined. Visualizing this with horizontal swimlanes on your board is the most effective way.
How do you currently negotiate with your sales team when they bring in these "Fire Drills" during the middle of an active campaign launch?
Color-coding cards by Class of Service helps at a glance, but swimlanes are better for enforcing WIP limits across those different categories of work.
Spot on, Susan. Visual cues like card colors paired with swimlanes create a high-visibility environment where anyone can see the health of the marketing funnel.
Steven, that negotiation is the hardest part! We started using a "Points" system for our capacity. When a fire drill comes in, we show them the board and ask which "Standard" task should be moved back to the backlog to make room. Having that visual "Limited Capacity" makes it much easier to say no or "not right now" without sounding like we are just being unhelpful.