Implementing Kanban

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.