What Is Kanban?
Kanban is a workflow management method for defining, managing, and improving services that deliver knowledge work. It aims to help you visualize your work, maximize efficiency, and improve continuously. Originating from manufacturing, it later became a territory claimed by Agile software development teams. Recently, it started getting recognized by business units across various industries.
As more and more people hear about Kanban, multiple questions arise:
- What exactly is Kanban?
- What are the Kanban principles and practices?
- What are the benefits of adopting Kanban?
The History of Kanban
The Japanese word “kanban”, meaning “visual board” or a “sign”, has been used in the sense of a process definition since the 1960s. The systems Toyota used to limit their work in progress have been called “kanban systems”. On the other hand, the capitalized term “Kanban” is known and associated with the emergence of the “Kanban Method,” which was first defined in 2007.
Initially, it arose as a scheduling system for lean manufacturing, originating from the Toyota Production System (TPS). In the late 1940s, Toyota introduced “just in time” manufacturing to its production. The approach represents a pull system. This means that production is based on customer demand rather than the standard push practice to produce goods and push them to the market.
Their unique production system laid the foundation of Lean manufacturing or simply Lean. Its core purpose is minimizing waste activities without sacrificing productivity. The main goal is to create more value for the customer without generating more costs.
The Kanban Method
At the beginning of the 21st Century, key players in the software industry quickly realized how Kanban could positively change the way products and services were delivered.
With an increased focus on efficiency and by harnessing advances in computing technology, Kanban left the automotive industry’s realm and was successfully applied to other complex commercial sectors such as IT, software development, R&D, and others.
Indeed, what we now recognize as the Kanban Method emerged at the beginning of 2007.
You can start building your Kanban system by setting up the most straightforward Kanban board with three basic columns – “Requested or New”, “In Progress” and “Done”.
However the columns can be augmented to suit different teams way of working. When constructed, managed, and functioning correctly, it serves as a real-time information repository, highlighting bottlenecks within the system and anything else that might interrupt smooth working practices.
Kanban Principles
Before exploring the Kanban values in more detail, we’d like to establish that the method in the shape and form we embrace and use today emerged due to many people’s collaborative efforts. The expanding Kanban community should acknowledge these ideas and contributions as such.
David J. Anderson (a pioneer in the field of Lean/ Kanban for knowledge work and one of the founding fathers of the method) has formulated the Kanban method as an approach to incremental, evolutionary process and systems change for knowledge work organizations. It is focused on getting things done, and its fundamentals can be broken down into two types of principles and six practices.
Change Management Principles
Blending with the already established processes in a non-disruptive way, pursuing evolutionary changes and continuous improvement. Let’s take a closer look at the Kanban change management principles.
Principle 1: Start With What You Do Now
Kanban offers the flexibility to use the method on top of existing workflows, systems, and processes without disrupting what is already in place. The method recognizes that existing processes, roles, responsibilities, and titles have value and are, generally, worth preserving. Naturally, it will highlight issues that need to be addressed and help assess and plan changes so their implementation is as non-disruptive as possible.
Principle 2: Agree to Pursue Incremental, Evolutionary Change
The Kanban methodology is designed to meet minimal resistance. It encourages continuous small incremental and evolutionary changes to the current process by implementing collaboration and feedback forms. In general, sweeping changes are discouraged because they usually encounter resistance due to fear or uncertainty.
Principle 3: Encourage Acts of Leadership at All Levels
Leadership at all levels derives from people’s everyday insights and acts to improve their way of working. As insignificant as you may think, each shared observation fosters a continuous improvement mindset (Kaizen) to reach optimal performance on a team/department/company level. This can’t be a management-level activity.
Service Delivery Principles
Kanban aims at developing a service-oriented approach. It requires that you profoundly understand your customer’s needs, create a network of services where people self-organize around the work, and ensure that your system continuously evolves.
Principle 1: Focus on Customer’s Needs and Expectations
Delivering value to the customer should be at the center of each organization. Understanding the needs and expectations of your customers brings the attention to the quality of the provided services and the value it creates.
Principle 2: Manage the Work
Managing the work in your network of services ensures that you empower people’s abilities to self-organize around the work. This enables you to focus on the desired outcomes without the “noise” created by micro-managing the people delivering the services.
Principle 3: Regularly Review the Network of Services
Once developed, a service-oriented approach requires continuous evaluation to foster a customer service culture. Through the use of regular reviews of the network of services and assessment of the applied work policies, Kanban encourages the improvement of the delivered results.
Kanban Practices
When aiming to implement the Kanban method, every organization must be careful with the practical steps. Six core practices need to be present for a successful implementation. While mastering these is vital, it’s an evolving process.
1. Visualize the Workflow
To visualize your process with a Kanban system, you will need a board with cards and columns. Each column on the board represents a step in your workflow. Each Kanban card represents a work item. The Kanban board itself represents the actual state of your workflow with all its risks and specifications.
The first and most important thing for you is understanding what it takes to get an item from a request to a deliverable product. Recognizing how work flows through your system will set you on the path to continuous improvement by making well-observed and necessary changes.
When you start working on item X, you pull it from the “To Do” column, and when it is completed, you move it to “Done”. This way, you can easily track progress and spot bottlenecks. Naturally, your Kanban board might have a different outlook as it depends on your specific needs and processes.
2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)
Digital Kanban Board with WIP Limits
thanks to kanbanize.com
One of Kanban’s primary functions is to ensure a manageable number of active items are in progress at any one time. If there are no work-in-progress limits, you are not doing Kanban. Switching a team’s focus halfway through will generally harm the process, and multitasking is a sure route to generating waste and inefficiency.
Limiting WIP means implementing a pull system on parts or the complete workflow. Setting maximum items per stage ensures that a card is only “pulled” into the next step when there is available capacity. Such constraints will quickly illuminate problem areas in your flow so you can identify and resolve them.
3. Manage Flow
Managing the flow is about managing the work but not the people. By flow, we mean the movement of work items through the production process at a predictable and sustainable pace.
One of the main goals when implementing a Kanban system is to create a smooth, healthy flow. Instead of micro-managing people and trying to keep them busy all the time, you should focus on managing the work processes and understanding how to get that work faster through the system. This would mean that your Kanban system is creating value more quickly.
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
You can’t improve something you don’t understand. This is why your process should be clearly defined, published, and socialized. People would not associate and participate in something they do not believe would be useful.
When everyone is familiar with the common goal, they would be able to work and make decisions regarding a positive impact. Sparse, visible, well-defined, and subject to change (if/when needed), work policies have the power to boost people’s self-organization.
5. Feedback Loops
For teams and companies that want to be more agile, implementing feedback loops is a mandatory step. They ensure that organizations are adequately responding to potential changes and enable knowledge transfer between stakeholders.
Kanban suggests the use of cadences (feedback loops) at a team level as well as service-oriented cadences.
An example of a team-level cadence is the daily Team Kanban Meeting for tracking the status and the flow of work. It helps to identify available capacity and potential for increasing the delivery pace. It takes place in front of the Kanban board, and every member tells the others what they did the previous day and what they will be doing today.
Ref: www.kanbanize.com
Service-oriented cadences in Kanban, such as operations, service delivery, and risk meetings, aim to synchronize and improve your delivery of service. The output of these reviews, such as understanding what is blocking effective service delivery, should serve as a decision-making input for the continuous improvement of your network of services.