The Kanban Guide

When aiming to implement the Kanban method, every organization must be careful with the practical steps. There are six core practices as identified by David Anderson that need to be present for successful implementation.

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 first and most important thing for you is understanding what it takes to get an item from a request to a deliverable product. Only after understanding how the flow of work currently functions can you aspire to improve it by making the necessary adjustments.

The first and most important thing for you is understanding what it takes to get an item from a request to a deliverable product. Only after understanding how the flow of work currently functions can you aspire to improve it by making the necessary adjustments.

2. Limit Work in Progress

One of Kanban’s primary functions is to ensure a manageable number of active items 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.

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, we should focus on managing the work processes and understanding how to get that work faster through the system. This would mean that our 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.

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. An example of such a feedback loop is the daily stand-up meeting for team synchronization. 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.

There are also the service delivery review, the operations review, strategy review, and the risk review meetings. The frequency depends on many factors, but the idea is that they are regular, at a strictly fixed hour, straight to the point, and never unnecessarily long.

The ideal average length of a stand-up should be between 10-15 minutes, and others may reach up to an hour or more depending on the team size and topics.

6. Improve Collaboratively (using models & the scientific method)

The way to achieve continuous improvement and sustainable change within an organization is through a shared vision of a better future and a collective understanding of the issues that need fixing.

Teams with a shared understanding of their goals, workflow, process, and risks are more likely to build a shared comprehension of a problem and work together towards improvement.

The Positive Side of Kanban

Nowadays, many organizations adopt the Kanban method to become more agile and bring order to their chaotic work processes. Simply said, a Kanban system helps you get more work done.

But let’s dig a bit deeper and see the real benefits of using Kanban.

• Everyone is on the same page

The basic idea of Kanban is visualizing every piece of work on a whiteboard. This way, the Kanban board turns into a central informational hub. All tasks are visible, and they never get lost, which brings transparency to the whole work process. Every team member can have a quick update on the status of every project or task.

• Kanban reveals bottlenecks in your workflow

Once you build a Kanban board and you fill it with cards, you will see that some columns will get overcrowded with tasks. This will help you spotlight bottlenecks in your workflow and tackle them properly.  For example, you can get a sense of how big tasks should be so your team can promptly move them forward.