Implementing Kanban

In this section, we have gathered materials that will help you get started with Kanban. Understanding the basic elements of Kanban is a vital step in boosting your productivity and building the foundation to utilize Kanban Tool appropriately and to its full potential.

The Daily Kanban Stand-up

by Neel Lakshminarayan

In Scrum, teams hold a daily scrum meeting (“daily scrum” or “scrum stand-up”). Once converted from Scrum to Kanban, teams tend to carry on conducting daily stand-up meetings with the three - standard for Scrum - questions. They are not necessarily valid for Kanban, since the Kanban board answers the first two right away. So, what questions should we be asking at a daily Kanban stand-up?

Kanban in 4 Easy Steps

by Zbigniew Zemła

Check out probably the best Kanban presentation - Kanban method in four easy steps.
Implementing significant improvements don’t have to be extremely difficult. Kanban is a revolutionary concept popularized by Toyota. Today Kanban is helping many companies around the globe to improve their productivity and efficiency.

What is Kanban & Why Should You Be Interested?

by Jim Benson

Kanban is a great method of organizing, improving and finishing work. It has been first developed at Toyota, to manage the stock and production of car parts. The aim of Kanban is to create a complete workflow transparency, so that everyone in an organization – from production line worker to the CEO – gain a better understanding of the process they’re involved in. This way each employee could see and improve the way his effort influences the entire process.

Pulling Value, Lean and Kanban

by David Joyce

In this presentation, Joyce makes an important distinction between industrial Kanban, Kanban for software development and Lean and Agile methodologies in general. The gist is: instead of figuring out what to call your approach, try making your process as successful as possible.

Aspects of Kanban

by Karl Scotland

Karl Scotland explains the concept of a Kanban system for software development. He identifies the important aspects from which Kanban systems can be viewed in order to understand and improve an overall organization’s delivery capability: workflow, visualization, work in process limit, cadence and continuous improvement. This article provides deep insight into those areas and their implications on a system.

Kanban, Flow and Cadence

by Karl Scotland

This is Karl Scotland’s take on Kanban, written at the beginning of the great Kanban for software development adaptation wave. It encompasses the general idea of Kanban, the concept of Flow and explains how to understand Cadence in Kanban systems.

In his article, Karl refers to Kanban as a means of controlling the workflow. Originally introduced for controlling the stock in automobile production industry (Toyota), it has been designed to allow for a just-in-time production in an automated way, but not void of the all important human touch.

What does this imply? At first glance, Kanban for software development looks just like a typical Agile workload board. The process is divided into stages, and tasks are transferred from one to another as the process goes on. As the tasks are moved, they are placed at the bottom of a stage column, and are meant to be pulled from the top. This way the order of things is kept with respect of the healthy FIFO rule.

Kanban - an Interview with D.J. Anderson

by David Anderson, Joseph Dager

Do you know people who change today’s world of software development by promoting evolutionary approaches to management? Meet David Anderson, pioneer of Kanban, who gave a recent interview for Joe Dager. Kanban guru tells us about focusing on business value and applying lean thinking not only to software companies. David describes how he helps software development teams to become more effective. In his opinion, Kanban is solving problems with change management and cultural change.

Kanban: an Alternative Path to Agility

by David Anderson

In this post globally recognized expert on Agile methodologies, David Anderson answers the question of “Is Kanban an Agile Method?“. He presents arguments why Kanban should be recognized as “an alternative path to agility” rather than be classified as an Agile method in itself.

Visual Management – Creating a Kanban Multiverse

by Karl Scotland

Karl Scotland brings us the origins and the idea behind a Kanban multiverse. He first came up with this idea while chatting with David Anderson about the possible advantage of creating a virtual Kanban board, that because of its non-physical presence could hold in more than a couple of informational dimensions - hence create a multiverse.
A Kanban multiverse would be built of Kanban boards regarding all aspects of the process, ranging from boards with particular tasks to boards regarding the general process vision and a company time-line.