One of the most common challenges when designing Kanban is the confusion between work item types and classes of service. These core concepts directly influence delivery speed, team productivity, and customer satisfaction.
One potential reason your Kanban system lacks clarity and consistent flow is confusion between work item types and classes of service. Exploring this topic can be beneficial if you want to reduce wasted time, prevent team frustration, avoid unpredictable delivery, minimise costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
Who is this guide for?
- Teams co-creating a Kanban system and aiming to define work item types and classes of service effectively
- Service Delivery Managers or Service Request Managers looking to review how work is categorised and prioritised
- Agile trainers or coaches preparing for Kanban training or STATIK workshops
- Kanban practitioners who want a clearer understanding of these foundational concepts
What you’ll learn in this guide:
- The key differences between work items, work item types and classes of service in Kanban
- How to define work item types and classes of service
- Real-world examples using simple analogies (including our popular coffee shop scenario)
Work item types classify what customers want (customer demand), while classes of service determine how your team responds to ensure the most valuable work reaches the right customer at the right time. Mastering both concepts will help your Kanban system work for you, not against you. Enjoy reading!
Why do we need Work Item Types and Classes of Service?
Work Item Types and Classes of Service in a Kanban System affect how we define demand and workflow, shape teams’ delivery, support discovery workflow and impact customer satisfaction. Some typically observed benefits resulting from properly defined work items and work item types:
- Optimised forecasting and predictability of delivery
- Improve follow-up and prioritisation
- Efficient people’s self-organisation and resource allocation
- Cost and time savings
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Support the decision-making process
- Help to manage risk better
The list above is impressive, but to realise these benefits, you must understand the difference between the two.
What is a Work Item
A deliverable or a component thereof resulting from the demand placed at the system that will be worked on by the service. (Kanban University, 2025). Each work item type corresponds to a specific kind of customer request. A work item can be treated as a deliverable or a component resulting from demand placed on the system, which the service will act upon.
What are Work Item Types
A work item type is a group of work items that behave similarly and follow the same workflow.
Work item types are categories or classifications that group similar kinds of Kanban work items. Since customers may have different requests, these can be grouped into distinct categories. Work Item types can be treated as a group of work items that behave similarly and follow the same workflow.
To learn more about the difference between Work Items and Work Item types, read Work Items vs Work Item Types in Kanban: A Practical Guide
What are the classes of service?
A specific level of service applied to the treatment of a work item or work item types is established through a defined set of policies. A class of service will often set a service level expectation. The choice of class of service may reflect a relative value, risk, or cost of delay (Kanban University, 2025). Each class comes with explicit policies that determine how items are prioritised, handled, and flowed through the system.
Example: Work Items vs Work Item Type vs Classes of Service
Imagine you are a barista in a popular coffee shop. Your customers can order various types of coffee, such as an espresso or a flat white. Each of these is a work item type, essentially a request type. In that case, a specific request type (type of coffee) can be treated as a work item type. Let’s now explore work item types.
Consider how the customer prefers to receive value. For instance, they might order a takeaway or dine at the coffee shop. For takeaway, the coffee comes in a disposable cup, and the customer expects it quickly. For dine-in, the coffee is served in a reusable cup and brought to the table. Although both are coffee orders, they follow different workflows and have other service expectations. These will be our work item types.
However, your team might decide to establish a specific set of policies regarding your service. No matter whether in the upstream (queue in front of the counter) or in the downstream (preparation of the order), you would like to serve some customers first without any need to wait. This will be your expedited class of service. You might also decide to introduce special treatment for the delivery clerk, who will collect large orders scheduled at particular times, as they significantly increase revenue but must be prepared at strict times due to customer preferences.
How to define Work Items
Defining and discovering work item types for new Kanban systems happens during a STATIK workshop. Due to Kanban’s evolutionary nature, the definition of work items can be revised whenever necessary. Typically, revision will occur during one of the Improvement Cadences, such as team retrospectives, flow reviews, service delivery reviews (to learn more about how to conduct the cadence, read this article for more detail) (Rola, 2024) or improvement suggestion reviews.
The responsibility and accountability for the Kanban system, including the definition of work items and work item types, rests with the Kanban team. It should be a collaborative process whenever you are trying to identify a work item type.
Below you can find a set of questions that I typically use to spark discussion about work item types (Rola, 2025):
- What kind of products do you produce to respond to the customer’s request?
- What kind of requests do you receive from customers?
- How do you currently refer to different kinds of work in discussions? Are there terms or labels that the team already uses informally?
- If a new team member joined today, how would you explain the categories of work they will be dealing with? What names would make it easiest for them to understand?
- What are the outputs coming from customer requests?
How to define Work Item types
Defining and discovering work item types are closely related to discovering work items. Discovering work item types should be a group discussion. It is beneficial to map all work items separately and then use the preferred clustering algorithm (a method used to organise data into groups or clusters based on similarity) to allow participants to group work items into categories. Commonly observed differentiation factors in defining work item types include:
- Demand for the Service
- Complexity of Problem
- Steps in the process of delivery
- Size and Efforts
- Skills and capabilities to deliver
- Customer expectations
- How is the output released
How to define Classes of Service
Typically, teams start to prototype classes of service based on archetypes of the cost of delays. Cost of delay archetypes refer to patterns categorising the economic impact of delaying work. They help prioritise tasks by quantifying the cost of postponing delivery. Cost of delay archetypes include:
- Urgent (Expedite): High, immediate cost if delayed (e.g., critical bugs).
- Fixed Date: Cost spikes after a deadline (e.g., regulatory compliance).
- Standard: Linear cost increase over time (e.g., typical features).
- Intangible: Low initial cost but growing long-term impact (e.g., technical debt)
The picture above illustrates archetypes of the cost of delay. A graph shows the relationship between the time spent delaying work and the cost of not delivering specific work.
Teams can add definitions of other classes of service that reflect the needs of customers and delivery teams associated with the requirement for special treatment of work in the Kanban system. You can use various factors such as human safety and customer emotions (to learn more about customer emotions and classes of service, read this article). In the case of customer emotions, we can consider two main processes.
- Recognition of customer needs through employee (person facing customer) empathy or usage of a support tool,
- Alternatives in handling and delivering customer requests to meet the needs arising from the recognition step.
The three cornerstones of the Kanban system
Work items, work item types, and classes of service are foundational elements. Without them, a Kanban system cannot function effectively.
- Work Items represent individual requests.
- Work Item Types help group similar work following the same path.
- Classes of Service define the urgency and manner in which that work flows.
When implemented correctly, these concepts create a framework that improves forecasting accuracy, enhances resource allocation, and ultimately boosts customer satisfaction. The coffee shop example demonstrates how even simple service contexts benefit from this clarity.
Remember that defining these elements is an evolutionary process. Start with your current understanding during a STATIK workshop, then refine your definitions through regular improvement cadences. The key success factor is the collaboration of the Kanban team. Team members should participate in identifying and categorising work items and establishing service policies that reflect your customers’ actual needs and your organisation’s capabilities.
Ready to Transform Your Kanban System?
Don’t let confusion between Work Item Types and Classes of Service hold back your team’s potential. Whether you’re implementing Kanban for the first time or looking to optimise your existing system, the right definitions can unlock significant improvements in delivery predictability and customer satisfaction.
Take the next step
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Bibliography
Kanban University. (2025, 1). Kanban.university. From Glossary: https://kanban.university/glossary/
Rola, P. (2025). pawelrol.com. From Work Items vs Work Item Types in Kanban: A Practical Guide: https://pawelrola.com/work-items-vs-work-item-types-in-kanban-a-practical-guide/
Kelly M. Wilder, J. E. (2014). Tailoring to Customers’ Needs: Understanding How to Promote an Adaptive Service Experience With Frontline Employees. Journal of Service Research.