Kanban: fresh air to Agile

Kanban is a delivery method, helping your team to deliver work in speed, by visualising the flow of work. It allows to spot where bottlenecks are, allowing improvement of workflow. Taiichi Ohno, an engineer at Toyota, created Kanban.

Kanban, in Japanese, refers to a card, part of a kanban board, that illustrates work in progress. Toyota applied Kanban to improve their manufacturing efficiency. Kanban is part the agile methodologies (like scrum). While some similarities can be found with scrum, there exist fundamental differences and serious advantages for Kanban. Let me give you an introduction on why it is so great :-)

The McDonald’s metaphor

I love McDonald’s. It is tasty, relatively inexpensive and fast due to a work flow that has been refined a countless amount of times.

Kanban is all about managing queues of work. From the moment you enter McDonald’s, to the ordering of your food and to the delivery of it.

When you go to McDonald’s you usually go through following steps:

• You wait in a queue to provide your order
• You provide your order to the cashier or to a machine
• You pay
• You wait to get served
• You eat
• & lastly you leave

This is a great example to illustrate Kanban, as it has most properties of a Kanban system. What happens from the restaurant point of view is:

• You arrive in the customer queue, randomly, like all other customers, waiting to provide your order
• The cashier receives your order, a list of random food and drink items. This can be related to a single piece of work that needs to be done. It has a variable complexity and value.
• You pay for your food. At this point, your order has entered the selected work queue.
• The cooks are preparing your food and drinks. The cooks select your food to cook depending on the queue of work
• Finally, your food is being handover and you can enjoy your meal

It is so easy to spot bottlenecks when you have deconstructed and visualised the work process: There aren’t enough cashiers to take all orders, There aren’t enough cooks to deliver the food. The cook is only cooking one meat at a time… simply by illustrating the flow and seeing where the cards are stuck on the board. The metaphor is simplified, but hopefully you get the picture on how useful it can be.

Kanban and Software Development

Kanban is not limited to an industry or a manufacturing of a physical good. It can be applied to any business process. Can you already see how Kanban can be applied for software development?

• The business comes up with a new idea.
• The business describes the idea, providing you a size, complexity and value to deliver.
• A card is being created(=a kanban) and added to your backlog of work
• Your team selects (=pull) the work depending on their availability and skills
• Your team deploys the work

The work goes from left to right; from a backlog of work to work considered as done.

Kanban Principles

Going deeper in the method: Kanban is led by principles

1. Visualize the work you do
   Visualization is the core of Kanban. A board illustrates the flow of work through different columns and rows. Each card flows from left to right; usually from a backlog of work to a state of finished work. Bottlenecks and wait time are spotted, due to the time it is stuck in a row. A board is a great way to share our understanding of workflow or to share work in progress.
2. Limit the amount of work in progress (WIP limit)
   “Stop starting, start finishing” is the main goal of Kanban. Moving work from one process to the other, efficiently from the beginning to the end is the objective. Kanban is a pull system, where each team takes work whenever they can. Each row has a WIP limit to avoid having too much work at the same time. This provides efficiency in work, since the participants of the boards are not drown under tons of work, which blocks productivity. Having a WIP limit forces the team to push through blockers.
3. Enhance your flow
   Blockers are your enemy. Spotting them becomes easy with Kanban; it is a great opportunity to bring improvements.
4. Continuous improvement
   A work process is never finished. The Continuous improvement approach allows removing of frictions/blockers. It requires constant monitoring and analysis to allow the team to improve continuously.

Key Metrics
One of the principle is “Limit your work in progress”. This forces the team to deliver work before proceeding with new tasks. At the end, no delivery means unhappy client.

You can measure delivery time with two metrics: Lead time and cycle time.

Lead Time is the time between the receival(=backlog) and completion of a task.

Cycle Time is the time between the start(=In progress) and completion of a task.

See the difference? Comparing this two metrics over time is a great way to measure improvement (and is sexy on charts!)

Kanban is so much more than a “to do, doing, done” board. I’ve only touched the surface here, but I hope I’ve gave you an interesting introduction and that you will consider it for your team. “Start with what you do now” is the core property of the Kanban method. Go try it out!

Want to deepen your knowledge? The free ebook Essential Kanban Condensed is a great place to start.

http://leankanban.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Essential-Kanban-Condensed.pdf