Upstream Kanban Prioritization using Value Rate

This is a really common question we encounter in Kanban training, coaching and consulting. In Upstream Kanban, stakeholders’ and product managers’ motivation is to select the best opportunities for a delivery team to work on. In Downstream Kanban the shared service’s motivation is to select among an undifferentiated jumble of requests that are all someone's #1 priority.

This session looks at using Value Rate as one of the ways to prioritize both upstream and downstream work. If we can introduce this approach in our organizations, the hypothesis is that not only will the upstream be clear and the tradeoff decisions obvious to all, but we will also create a priority-inheritance system that propagates through the network of teams as shared services and other dependencies get activated.