Why Kanban?

Without going into deeper analysis, it would seem that as far as making the transition towards Agile easy, choosing Kanban fits the bill. It is very often the first choice - over Scrum - for development or manufacturing teams. That’s because it needs fairly little adjustment and allows people to stay within their previous roles. All that is required from the team is to make their process steps transparent to everyone, stick to a once set WIP limit and to the queue of tasks, as based on the pull method. In Michael’s experience though, it’s not always as straightforward as it may seem.

Kanban can indeed change your life, and specifically the professional area of it, by bringing order and a method to the way you do things.
Greater efficiency, better focus, less waste, easier communication and process transparency are among some of the possible benefits. Kanban is incredibly flexible and can be easily adapted in nearly any industry and any size of company or even for personal use.

WIP is an acronym for Work in Progress and it refers to all partly done tasks that have not yet been completed. Limiting WIP is one of vital principles of Personal Kanban. Why do we pay so much attention to this issue? Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry explain the meaning, the importance and the application of Work in Progress limits. The authors provide the readers with a simple simulation of what happens if you don’t limit the amount of work you can handle at one time. Read this post in order to avoid the most frequent problems: leaving things unfinished and compromising the quality of your work.

What is Kanban and what does it stand for? When should you apply it? These questions are answered in this excellent article by Vikas Hazrati.
Kanban is an innovative approach to project management, allowing the teams become more effective and making their process more streamlined. There are several situations to which Kanban just isn’t the right answer.

This article is addressed particularly to those who wish to broaden their knowledge of Kanban. It is not a brief summary of Kanban core practices, but a profound reflection on Kanban foundation principles. Inspired by previous publications and discussions in this field, Mike Burrows developed a value-based description of the Kanban method.

In the 3rd post in the series, Tonianne and Jim make an analogy between the way mechanical parts require some looseness in order to work right, and the way people’s way of working does too. Also, the ever-increasing number of distractions does not help the task of having to focus on the really important stuff.

It may seem that because of the simplicity of the Kanban idea (visualize work and limit how much is in progress) there is not much more to consider here. But there is!
What is work in progress exactly? Is this what you have in front of you and look at? Or is it what your thoughts are busy with processing? Learn the difference and the psychological implications to be able to set the correct WIP limits.

David Anderson was the pioneer who implemented Kanban for teamwork management, rather than for the original industrial stock management (at Toyota). With years of experience in high technology industry, he has been a successful leader in managing highly productive teams with Motorola, Sprint among them. Nowadays he leads a consulting business, developing and applying sustainable methods of Agile process management.
Pete Abilla interviewed David Anderson in 2014. The main topics of their discussion were the background of the adaptation Kanban for knowledge-based industry, some application examples and some of the resistance points regarding Kanban implementation. This article presents hard evidence for using Kanban.

The biggest question about the efficiency of applying Kanban to your project management is very likely: How are we going to meet deadlines, since the system works on no time estimation and doesn’t set time-frames for the iterations?
The answer provided by David Anderson highlights two main sources of this kind of project forecasting. These are: the lead time of the project tasks throughput and the application of the Little’s Law. So basically, what we’re asked to do is to base our future commitment capabilities on the historical data regarding our team’s performance.

This article answers the question of why Kanban method, which originates from the manufacturing industry and Toyota Production System, is today widely used to manage software development processes. The author explains two important things: what is meant by lean manufacturing Kanban, and what characterizes a Kanban for software development approach and what are its possible applications.