Kanban is a visual workflow tool that, while originally used as a Toyota scheduling system, is now associated with in an agile methodology, especially in DevOps software development. It can also be used in traditional project management methodologies.
As its popularity has grown, kanban boards have found a use in industries looking for a way to have everyone on the team view the state of their work. This requires real-time communication and an understanding of kanban principles.
The 4 Kanban Principles
The kanban method is governed by a set of principles. This allows for better management of the process, which improves the flow of work. The kanban method is constantly changing, and you should always be looking to find ways to improve the process.
These gradual improvements are a foundational pillar of the kanban principles. The goal is to always improve an organization’s processes. The four kanban principles were developed to use kanban in such a way that you’re always maximizing the benefits to your business process.
Improvements to kanban include better flow, a reduction of cycle time, increasing value to the customer and developing products that increase predictability. Naturally, these are crucial objectives for any business that hopes to stay in business.
1. Visualize Workflow
Kanban was designed to visualize the workflow. Anyone looking to implement the kanban method will need to visualize their workflow. What that means is putting your workflow on a board. That board, as mentioned above, could be an actual board, or kanban software. Then, you need to detail the steps in your process or production that deliver the service or product.
This results in a kanban board that on one end of the spectrum is very simple (the to-do, doing and done we outlined earlier) or it can be very complex depending on your process. Once the process of your work is on the board, such as all their work items, you can begin to visualize the work your team is doing.
The board can also have what’s called “swimlanes,” which are horizontal lines that break up your kanban board into sections to visualize different work types in your workflow. This separates work that follows a similar process from the other activities on your board. It can also be used to manage more than one project on a single board or to manage an individual’s work.
2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)
Work in progress (WIP) is a term that refers to the tasks that are being worked on at the time, whether by the team or a single team member. This is an important kanban principle, as it can help prevent work overloads and improve workflow.
Also referred to as a pull system, limiting the WIP makes it more likely that team members will complete what they’re currently working on rather than moving on to the next task. In other words, before a new kanban card can be moved over to the next column, the card you’re currently working on has to be marked as done.
What this does is create capacity in the system. New work can now be pulled by the team. It might take some time before you can figure out what the WIP limit is, and it’s not unusual to start off without even having a limit to your work in progress.
The goal of lean kanban is to start with no limits and monitor the WIP. Once you have some experience and data, you’ll be able to make a more insightful decision as to how much to limit your WIP for each column on your kanban board. Whatever you decide on, adding the number to the column is a great way to communicate the limited capacity to the team and stakeholders.
3. Focus on Flow
The kanban process is about visualizing workflow and in so doing managing it to improve that flow. Therefore, focusing on the flow of your board is a guiding kanban principle. These principles are in order, therefore, once you do the above two kanban principles, you can begin to manage the flow.
This is done by highlighting the different stages of the workflow and the status of the work in each of these columns. You’ll either see smooth sailing ahead or bottlenecks with work piling up, which impacts your capacity. This, of course, depends on how well you’ve defined the workflow and what WIP limits you have set.
What you’re looking for in a larger sense is how fast your work moves from the start to the finish of your workflow. This can also be called your value stream. Because of the visual nature of the kanban board, there is transparency that allows for the team to analyze the system and make adjustments as needed to improve flow and reduce the time it takes to complete tasks.
One way to do this is by looking at the intermediate wait stages or intermediate done stages and seeing how long tasks remain in these handoff stages. By reducing the time in a handoff stage you can reduce the overall cycle time. Improving flow leads to your team working more smoothly and predictably. Better forecasting means more accurate commitments to customers.
4. Continuous Improvement
Since kanban is evolutionary, which means change, you will be always reviewing and modifying your kanban process to improve the flow. This can be done by experimenting with small changes and making incremental improvements that can be easily handled by the whole team using the scientific management method.
This change management of improving collaboratively and evolving experimentally by using the scientific method you can form a hypothesis, test it and make informed decisions based on that method. The scientific approach of incremental change is the basis of lean and agile principles.
Therefore, a product owner should always be evaluating the process with the aim of achieving a continuous improvement to workflow. Each change is monitored and measured to make sure it’s doing what you want and not having the opposite effect.
You can collect kanban system data on your team’s service delivery manually on a physical board or automatically when using kanban software. The digital tools often have dashboards and reporting that monitor and detail these metrics to assist when evaluating performance.
