Kanban in 30 Days

Use visual control so no problems are hidden
Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes
Add value to the organization by developing your people and partners:
Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others
Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy

In the Lean attitude, there is also a way of handling visions that are overwhelming. It is a simple way and can be described with these steps:
Define your vision even if it feels impossible to reach.
Define where you are now.
Define what next reachable goal in the right direction.
Iteratively make improve

Practice 2 – limiting work in progress
The second practice is about limiting work in progress

Practice 3 – managing flow
The third practice is about improving the flow of a process so the time-to-market, also called lead-time, is decreased.

The first practice is to visualize what you are doing. This includes both the steps in the process and what work you currently have in each step.

The four foundational principles of Kanban
The Kanban method is described by the following foundational principles:
Start with what you do now
Agree to pursue evolutionary change
Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities, and job titles
Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

This team was working both with projects, mostly setting up new customers and improving the operation situation, and making sure the service for existing customers was working. Some days they spent most of their time on fire fighting and some days they could spend the whole day on projects. Since the variation in available time was so big, the team didn't want to give the stakeholders any guess for when projects could be done.
The solution was for the team to only plan 50 percent of their time over a two-week period. The prioritization was:
Fighting fires.
Planned project work.
Other work that was needed but not planned.
If they were not able to complete the work for a two-week period the work was hopefully done in the next period together with the work that was planned for those weeks.

The reason for separating internal plans and status updates from what is externally communicated is because plans, which include buffers, seem to result in low energy in the team. There is even a law articulated for this. It's called Parkinson's law and goes like this: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". That means that if we include buffers in our plan, the buffers will be used.

Here are some ways you can act if your burn down graph is showing delays:
Cut the scope: Remove the work with least value and save that for a later release.
Add more people: This does not always work since more people also mean more communication and more knowledge spreading. It's not uncommon that adding people actually delays the release even more because of these factors and the confusion and misunderstandings that come with it.
Accept the delay: The risk here is to grow a never-mind-culture and continuous delays may cause distrust from stakeholders.
Of these three the first, cut the scope, is the one we recommend since it's best for fast feedback and return of investment (ROI).

When the questions are answered it's time for everyone to choose a card that represents their estimation.
When all the estimators have selected a card, they simultaneously show their cards.
If they are not all showing the same result they need to argue why they chose the card. Some of the reasons could be false assumptions and some could be things not even the knowledgeable one was thinking of. This is actually the biggest advantage of planning poker exercises according to us.
After new questions and answers everybody picks new cards, which are shown with the new debate as the result. This continues until everybody is showing the same card. If it's just impossible to get an end of the discussions, go for the highest estimation, so no one can say they got pushed to give a lower estimation than they wanted.
We recommend you use quick estimation when you are at the beginning of a project and planning poker when you have a few items to estimate.