Kanban Results

How to achieve better results with Kanban? When will you see the first results of implementation? How will Kanban influence your team? What are the best Kanban metrics? In this article, David Joyce describes his team’s progress in shortening delivery and engineering times, lead and cycle time and throughput. The team have a lot to be proud of.

This article presents Karen Greaves’ thoughts on Kanban, the process of Kanban implementation and its evolution. Her impressions and advice have been influenced by a David Anderson’s Kanban workshop, that she attended.
She begins with clearing up the main differences between Scrum and Kanban. The most poignant one is the fact, that Kanban is not based in iterations, like Scrum, therefor it doesn’t demand quite so much effort and alteration to implement. The crucial difference however lies in applying work in progress limits, as a main characteristic of Kanban.

One of the crucial properties of Kanban is spotting bottlenecks and facilitating steps, that lead to resolving them.
Leaving items too long in the pipeline can cause them to lose value (particularly in case of software). Also, according to the Theory of Constraints, the slowest delivery rate in process - the worst bottleneck - is the delivery rate of the entire system. Quite important to make sure the bottlenecks are being sorted out then, isn’t it?

Managing change requests is never the most sought after position in a company. The work is hard and demanding. All the more reason to come up with some great ideas on improving it.
When considering Agile solutions for this line of work, Eric Landes decided to go for Kanban, In the first month after implementation the backlog shrank from 110 features to less than 60 and cycle time decreased to around 5 weeks.

It’s been a long while since Kanban became a new way of managing knowledge-based work, but this doesn’t mean people get it, unfortunately. It still remains widely misunderstood.

Some of the most often misused concepts include a belief, that Kanban is meant to be applied for non-timeboxed workflows only, that no rules means making up own rules and following them, the connection to the original stock management Kanban also creates significant misunderstanding of the overall concept.

This article entertains a very interesting concept of replacing a burn-down chart with the “done” column. Normally, the “done” column is a collection of all items completed. What Jvonvoss, author of the original post, suggests is turning it into a kind of a graph with all the work done.

If you’re one of the true believers in Kanban and its success rates, here is a piece of news to you - there are times when it will not work. Thinking it is an answer to all problems and a recipe for success in all cases is a nice idea, but quite an unrealistic one.
Find out what are the common reasons for Kanban failure and see how easy it is to avoid them.