Kanban
Steven Daniel Bonacorsi ??
Steven Bonacorsi ?? President of the International Standard for Lean Six Sigma (ISLSS)?, ?? Certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, ?? Lean Six Sigma Group, Owner PMP, MBA, ???? MS-CIS, Agilest, Management Consultant
What is a Kanban?
Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. Kanban visualizes both the process (the workflow) and the actual work passing through that process.
What is the goal of using Kanban?
The goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them so work can flow through it cost-effectively at an optimal speed or throughput.
What does the work Kanban mean?
Kanban, also?spelt?“kamban” in Japanese, translates to “Billboard” (“signboard” in Chinese) that indicates “available capacity (to work)”.?
Why should I use Kanban?
Kanban is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production, where it is used as a scheduling system that tells you what to?produce,?when to produce it, and how much to produce.?
Where did Kanban originate?
It all started in the early 1940s. The first Kanban system was developed by?Taiichi Ohno (Industrial Engineer and Businessman) for Toyota automotive in Japan. It was created as a simple planning system, the aim of which was to control and manage work and inventory at every stage of production optimally.
What Problem did Kanban solve?
A key reason for the development of Kanban was the inadequate productivity and efficiency of?Toyota?compared to its American automotive rivals. With Kanban, Toyota achieved a flexible and efficient just-in-time production control system that increased productivity while reducing cost-intensive inventory of raw materials, semi-finished materials, and finished products.
Kanban is a system?
A?Kanban system?ideally controls the entire value chain from the supplier to the end consumer. In this way, it helps avoid supply disruption and overstocking of goods at various stages of the process. Kanban requires continuous monitoring of the process. Particular attention needs to be given to avoid bottlenecks that could slow down the production process. The aim is to achieve higher throughput with lower delivery lead times. Over time, Kanban has become an efficient way in a variety of production systems.
What is the Kanban Method?
The Kanban Method is a process to gradually improve whatever you do – whether it is software development, IT/ Ops, Staffing, Recruitment, Marketing and Sales, Procurement etc. In fact, almost any business function can benefit from applying the principles of the Kanban Methodology.
What are some of the Kanban Principles & Practices?
The Kanban Method follows a set of principles and practices for managing and improving the flow of work. It is an evolutionary, non-disruptive method that promotes gradual improvements to an organization’s processes. If you follow these principles and practices, you will successfully be able to use Kanban for maximizing the benefits to your business process – improve flow, reduce cycle time, increase value to the customer, with greater predictability – all of which are crucial to any business today.
The 4 foundational principles of the Kanban Methodology are?
1. Start with what you are doing now
2. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
3. Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities and job-titles
4. Encourage acts of leadership at all levels
6 Core Practices of the Kanban Method:
1. Visualize the flow of work
This can be in the form of stickies or cards with different colors to signify either different classes of service or could be simply the different type of work items. If you think it may be useful, your Kanban board can have different Swim Lanes, one for each class of service or for each work item type. However, initially, to keep things simple, you could also just have a single swimlane to manage all your work – and do any board redesign later.
2. Limit WIP (Work in Progress)
Typically, many teams start with a WIP Limit of 1 to 1.5 times the number of people working in a specific stage. Limiting WIP and putting the WIP limits on each column of the board not only helps the team members first finish what they are doing before taking up new stuff – but also communicates to the customer and other stakeholders that there is limited capacity to do work for any team – and they need to plan carefully what work they ask the team to do.
3. Manage Flow
A key aspect of this process of observing your work and resolving/ eliminating bottlenecks is to look at the intermediate wait stages (the intermediate Done stages) and see how long work items stay in these “handoff stages”. As you will learn, reducing the time spent in these wait stages is key to reducing Cycle Time. As you improve flow, your team’s delivery of work becomes smoother and more predictable. As it becomes more predictable, it becomes easier for you to make reliable commitments to your customer about when you will get done with any work you are doing for them. Improving your ability to forecast completion times reliably is a big part of implementing a Kanban system!
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
As part of visualizing your process, it makes sense to also define and visualize explicitly, your policies (process rules or guidelines) for how you do the work you do. By formulating explicit process guidelines, you create a common basis for all participants to understand how to do any type of work in the system. The policies can be at the board level, at a swim lane level and for each column. They can be a checklist of steps to be done for each work item-type, entry-exit criteria for each column, or anything at all that helps team members manage the flow of work on the board well. Examples of explicit policies include the definition of when a task is completed, the description of individual lanes or columns, who pulls when, etc. The policies must be defined explicitly and visualized usually on the top of the board and on each lane and column.
5. Implement Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are an integral part of any good system. The Kanban Method encourages and helps you implement feedback loops of various kinds – review stages in your Kanban board workflow, metrics and reports and a range of visual cues that provide you continuous feedback on work progress – or the lack of it – in your system. While the mantra of “Fail fast! Fail often!” may not be intuitively understood by many teams, the idea of getting feedback early, especially if you are on the wrong track with your work, is crucial to ultimately delivering the right work, the right product or service to the customer in the shortest possible time. Feedback loops are critical for ensuring that.
6. Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally
The impact of each change that you make can be observed and measured using the various signals your Kanban system provides you. Using these signals, you can evaluate whether a change is helping you improve or not and decide whether to keep it or try something else. Kanban systems help you collect a lot of your system’s performance data – either manually, if you use a physical board, or automatically. Using this data, and the metrics it helps you generate, you can easily evaluate whether your performance is improving or dropping – and tweak your system as needed.
How does Kanban work?
Kanban is a non-disruptive evolutionary change management system. This means that the existing process is improved in small steps. By implementing many minor changes (rather than a large one), the risk to the overall system is reduced. The evolutionary approach of Kanban leads to low or no resistance in the team and the stakeholders involved.
The first step in the introduction of Kanban is to visualize the workflow. This is done in the form of a?Kanban board consisting of a simple whiteboard and sticky notes or cards. Each card on the board represents a task.
In a classic Kanban board model, there are three columns, as shown in the picture above:
This simple visualization alone leads to a great deal of transparency about the distribution of the work as well as existing bottlenecks if any. Of course, Kanban boards can show elaborate workflows depending on the complexity of the workflow and the need to visualize and examine specific parts of the workflow to identify bottlenecks in order to remove them.
What is the concept of Flow?
At the core of Kanban is the concept of “Flow”. This means that the cards should flow through the system as evenly as possible, without long waiting times or blockages. Everything that hinders the flow should be critically examined. Kanban has different techniques, metrics and models, and if these are consistently applied, it can lead to a culture of continuous improvement (kaizen).
The concept of Flow is critical and by measuring Flow metrics and working to improve them, you can dramatically improve the speed of your delivery processes while reducing cycle time and improving the quality of your products or services by getting faster?feedback from your customers?– internal or external.
What is a Kanban WIP Limit?
A key aspect of Kanban is to reduce the amount of multi-tasking that most teams and knowledge workers are prone to do and instead encourage them to “Stop Starting! And Start Finishing!”, a mantra coined by Dr. Arne Roock. WIP – Work-in-Progress – Limits defined at each stage of the workflow on a Kanban board encourage team members to finish work at hand and only then, take up the next piece of work.
Kanban System Examples
The beauty of Kanban is in its simplicity. However, Kanban is not just about visualizing a process on a white board (or an electronic board) and working with stickies or electronic cards. As you can see from above, it is much more than that. You will truly benefit from its implementation if you apply all the principles and practices in a methodological manner.
The current trends from around the world show that Kanban is gaining in popularity and is being used in many different areas, from small agencies and start-ups to traditional organizations of all sizes.
Can Kanban work in IT & Software?
Kanban is not a software development or a?project management?methodology – David makes that very clear in his ‘Blue Book’. Kanban does not say anything about how a Software should be developed. It does not even say anything about how Software projects should be planned and implemented. Therefore, Kanban is not a management framework such as Scrum. Instead, the purpose of Kanban is to continually improve one’s own work process.
Kanban was used in Microsoft's software development operations in 2004. Since then, Kanban has been adopted enthusiastically in the IT, Ops, DevOps and applications/ software teams.
The beauty of Kanban is that it can be applied to any process or methodology. Whether you are already using Agile methods such as Scrum, XP and others, or more traditional methods – waterfall, iterative, etc. – you can apply Kanban on top of that to gradually start improving your processes, reduce cycle time and improve your flow. In the process, you will find yourself on the path to continuous delivery of features, products or services.
How do you Get Started with Kanban?
Kanban can appear to be deceptively simple. A lot of teams start with?Kanban?by just putting up a whiteboard and moving stickies across it. However, as explained in this?Kanban guide, while Kanban appears simple, it provides some elegant tools and techniques based on Lean/ Agile principles and theories, which, when used effectively, bring you significant business benefits such as greater predictability, better throughput and quality, and reduced time to market.
The Kanban Method truly abstracts these principles for the benefit of knowledge teams and help them get these benefits. But it is important that you – and your team/ organization – learn about these principles and the associated benefits and apply them fully.
There is an enormous number of resources available in the form of books and blogs. These are listed below.
Best Kanban Books:
David Anderson
领英推荐
Mike Burrows
Corey Ladas
Jim Benson
Yuval Yeret
Dan Vacanti
Don Reinertsen
Mattias Skarin
Klaus Leopold, Siegfried Kaltenecker
Andrew Stellman and Margaret C. L. Greene
Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sundén Foreword by Jim Benson
Paul Klipp
Tonianne DeMaria Barry & Jim Benson
Henrik Kniberg
Raymond S. Louis
John M. Gross & Kenneth R. McInnis
Lean and Kanban Blogs:
Digité Blog –?https://www.digite.com/blog/
David Anderson Blog –?https://djaa.com/blog
Lean Kanban Inc. Blog –?https://leankanban.com/blog/
Everyday Kanban Blog –?https://www.everydaykanban.com
Frank Vega –?https://www.vissinc.com/blog/
Hakan Forss –?https://hakanforss.wordpress.com/
Lean Enterprise Institute –?https://www.lean.org/LeanPost/
Andy Carmichael –?https://xprocess.blogspot.co.uk/
Yuval Yeret –?https://yuvalyeret.com/
Agile Sparks –?https://www.agilesparks.com/blog/
Ben Linders –?https://www.benlinders.com/
Rob Bowley –?https://blog.robbowley.net/
Other resources
10 Factors For Kanban Board Design?(whitepaper)
Kanban Maturity Model (KMM)?(whitepaper)
Follow?International Standard for Lean Six Sigma (ISLSS)?Company Page
Join the?Lean Six Sigma Group
Subscribe to this?Lean Six Sigma Newsletter
Contact?Steven Bonacorsi?if you have free Lean Six Sigma resources you would like to share with our followers.
Stone Mason at Rock Star Construction
2 年Is there a standard color coding for kanban cards?
This awesome, potential info
Steven Bonacorsi ?? President of the International Standard for Lean Six Sigma (ISLSS)?, ?? Certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, ?? Lean Six Sigma Group, Owner PMP, MBA, ???? MS-CIS, Agilest, Management Consultant
2 年Kanban systems are almost always customized for the process, rarely can you just plug and play, and while simple and where we usually start, we will add or change to meet our specific process needs. Kanban often needs to be sized, labeled, colored, stacked, counted, reused, adjusted, carried, digitized, etc... so because of this, it's best to start simple, ensure its working. You might need a kanban board, and you might not, you might need kanban tags and you might not, you might need to add a reorder point and you might not, the adjustments needed are customized.
Msc. Preven??o de Riscos Laborais | Especialista em Higiene Ocupacional | Seguran?a do Trabalho | Ergonomia e Saúde | Um Eterno Aprendiz Desbastando a Pedra Bruta
2 年Excellent publication!
Program Manager - Process Architecture - Business Excellence - Change Management
2 年This is an excellent article/presentation! Thank you Steven!