The Recovering Kanban-ers

We've been using a Kanban-like approach for about 36 months. While it's not perfect, it's advantage is that it's actually fairly flexible: you can modify it to fit your needs.

For example: we look at the immediate backlog at the beginning of every week, and then look at what we accomplished on Fridays.

We also do longer range planning at a monthly Product meeting where Engineering, Sales and the Product Manager all look forward to bigger product milestones. We also try to set general launch dates for these.

We use http://sprint.ly to manage the dev process, which has added features for estimating delivery (based on past performance). Everyone in the company can access Sprint.ly, suggest features, and see what items are currently being worked on.

Most of the criticisms aren't really the fault of Kanban itself though. Who did they bring in to help them with Kanban? It is no substitute for all the things you rightfully claimed were missing.