Kanban is an agile framework that is focussed on process improvement. Using kanban can help an agile team improve their workflow by focussing on managing their Work in Progress or WIP. Using a pull system, work items move through a value stream where they are pulled through the development cycle. New work items are pulled into the value stream only as work is complete. Work items are visually represented on a board where it allows team members to track the flow of work. Based on a continuous flow system driven by demand, Kanban fulfills an immediate need based on priority and resources available to do the work.
Kanban is a Japanese term for visual card:
- Kan = Visual
- Ban = Card
Kanban Principles
Core Principles
- Start with what you know. Kanban doesn’t require changing your current process. Instead, your current process evolves over time.
- Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change. The team (or organization) has to agree their current process has to change. Kanban encourages small, incremental and evolutionary change. Furthermore, large, big-bang changes are discouraged because it will create resistance.
- Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities and titles. The organization will have some processes, roles and responsibilities worth preserving. Kanban encourages small, incremental and evolutionary change. However, it doesn’t prescribe change just for the sake of change.
- Encourage acts of leadership at all levels. Leadership comes from individuals who are empowered and self-directed. Everyone adopts a continuous improvement mindset, which fosters leadership at all levels. There must be culture of trust and safety to take fear away from those who may feel rebuttal for their ideas.
Basic Practices
- Visualize the Workflow. Visualizing the workflow helps to organize, optimize and track work.
- Limit Work In Progress. Restricting the amount of work in progress improves productivity. Bottlenecks are exposed which gives continuous improvement opportunities.
- Manage Flow. Looking at how work flows through the system will identify issues. The team experiments with changes to remove issues and improve flow.
- Make Process Policies Explicit. It’s important to clearly explain how things work. An example of a process policy is the Definition of Done.
- Improve Collaboratively. Through experimentation and measurement, the team should collectively own and improve the process it uses.
Benefits of Doing Agile Project Management using Kanban
Agile project management that uses a kanban system can provide teams with many benefits. Some of these benefits include the following:
- Flexibility. Any team can use kanban, from development to marketing.
- Identification and elimination of bottlenecks. Once you set up your kanban board, columns may get overcrowded with tasks. This indicates a bottleneck. Kanban enables you to see these bottlenecks so that you can do something about them.
- Improved teamwork. The team works together to resolve bottlenecks in their process flow as well as continuously improving.
- Reduction of wasted effort. Kanban follows Lean practices of reducing waste.
Work in Process (WIP) limits in Kanban
Too many tasks going on at one time forces you to multitask. In reality, multitasking is inefficient. It causes a lot of task switching, which is a form of waste. Limiting WIP will increase throughput which increases the amount of work done. Setting WIP limits is how Kanban optimizes overall flow. Any individual stage in the value stream will have capacity limitations to limit the overall Work in Process.
For example, the board in Figure 1 shows WIP limits for In Progress and In Testing. There can be no more than 4 cards in progress and 2 in testing. Limiting WIP encourages team members to finish their current work and only then take up a new work item. When starting Kanban, it will take experimentation to get your WIP at the right balance.
Mapping The Value Stream
Kanban teams visualize their workflow through value stream mapping. As a result, they will begin to see potential improvement opportunities. For example, when the team maps out deployment steps, they may see waste in terms of wait times. With this in mind, value stream mapping helps the team see inefficiencies. As a result, the they Can take action to improve their process.
In Summary
Kanban is a flexible system focussed on process improvement. Following Kanban’s core principles and basic practices will result in continuous improvement for your process, team and organization.
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