Everything is going faster. We are trying to ship our products as fast as we can, and we now have the tools to accelerate things to the point that those who don't will be left behind. To be successful, you have to deliver your business projects, maintenance changes, security patches, infrastructure upgrades, code refactors, and a lot more that will keep your application healthy in the long run. How do we manage that?

Think of your software business like an assembly line. Every step of putting the software to production is linked, and one slow part of the chain will delay the whole thing. To go faster, you need visibility on all the steps that are sluggish and make them part of your tasks like any other. Putting these tasks together will require putting people together and thinking together.

If you're starting, your Kanban board should be mostly full of these jobs. Once the assembly line looks okayish, write one single business feature and try to push it to production as soon as you can. How long did it take? Did you find any manual tasks that bottlenecks? Open new stories to fix them! Write a second feature and deploy it to production as soon as you can. Was it better? Did you break your first story? Your tests are now the bottleneck! Could you find a way to automate them? A thousand stories are coming in the line.

This is the way. Once you have a working assembly line for one project, please don't keep it for one. Use it for all of them.