Towards sustainable work management in scientific facilities: applying Kanban at ALBA Controls

Controls engineers in scientific facilities manage numerous projects, support multiple Customer Units (CUs), and balance operational demands with new initiatives. This often leads to growing backlogs and staff stress. Meanwhile, managers struggle to allocate resources across CUs, frequently prioritizing short-term goals at the expense of long-term strategy. At ALBA, such pressures prompted a new organizational approach. Building on lessons from successful past transitions - including the 2013 shift to operations * and a major staff turnover ** - the Controls Section adopted the Kanban method to optimize the resource allocation and maximize the throughput. Tasks were categorized by size/complexity and Class of Service (CoS), and a unified board with multiple views was implemented to visualize Work In Progress (WIP) and support follow-up. All work begins in a visible backlog, jointly prioritized with CUs based on CoS. Dedicated engineering teams were formed to improve coordination and knowledge sharing. Policies and metrics are clearly defined and transparent. The implementation was done using Jira and Confluence (Atlassian ecosystem). First results of the new approach are included in the paper. This initiative aligns with broader organizational efforts such as the Activity Plan for ALBA (APA) and project tracking within the Computing division \***, laying the groundwork toward the ALBA II upgrade to a 4th generation synchrotron light source.