This chapter covers
- What a class of service is
- Putting classes of service to use for you
- Examples of commonly used classes of services
In the previous chapter you learned different ways to manage the flow of work. One thing all those different principles, rules of thumb, and good practices didn’t address was that not all work items are of equal importance. Some types of work may need to flow faster through the workflow than others. This is where the concept of classes of service comes in handy. Let’s start with an example of a pretty standard case.
The case of a particularly urgent work item is a well-known one to many teams; there’s often a need to be flexible with your process to allow for important and valuable exceptions to your normal rules and policies. It could be a production issue, a fix needed to comply with a regulation or a contract, a business opportunity you have to act on fast—anything that makes it reasonable to drop what you’re doing to drive this work item to completion as fast as possible. A common way to visualize this is to add a special lane on the board to make it clear that it’s a different class of item with special policies attached to it. Be explicit about what these policies are—here’s an example we’ve seen:
