MOST Analysis

Mission Statement

Kanban is a method of workflow management that focuses on minimizing waste and maximizing efficiency. Kanban helps in visualizing the workflow in an organization or a project and helps identify roadblocks that are constricting the path of flow. In the IT transformation process too, Kanban can be sued to accelerate the process with maximum efficiency and achieve output faster. Implementing Kanban is relatively simple. To visualize the workflow, traditionally a Kanban board was used. There are different columns on the board that represent each stage of the workflow and some cards with each work item or task written on them. As a particular task is ready to be taken up, it is added to the board, and as it progresses the corresponding card also moves from one column to the next until the task is completed. The aim here is to improve the flow which means there should be no work getting stuck.

Kanban works on a pull system. That means new work will only be pulled in when there is the capacity to accommodate that work. To achieve this, a limit is set on the work-in-progress column of the Kanban board, so only a specific number of cards should be on that column at a given time. New tasks, or cards, will only be added when there is an available slot. This helps improve the efficiency of the process, reduce the pressure on the team and identify any bottlenecks in the process. Today, there are several software and tools that help organizations implement Kanban effectively.

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Objectives

01. Visualize Workflow: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Limit Work in Progress (WIP): departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. Make Policies Explicit: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Manage Flow: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. Implement Feedback Loops: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month

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Strategies

01. Visualize Workflow: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Limit Work in Progress (WIP): Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. Make Policies Explicit: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Manage Flow: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. Implement Feedback Loops: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.

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Tasks

01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Visualize Workflow.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Limit Work in Progress (WIP).
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Make Policies Explicit.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Manage Flow.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Implement Feedback Loops.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally.

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Introduction

Kanban is a popular Lean workflow management technique for outlining, overseeing, and enhancing information work delivery offerings. It assists you in visualizing work, maximizing efficiency, and continually improving during any IT change. On Kanban boards, work is represented, enabling you to manage even the most complicated projects in a single setting while optimizing job delivery across many teams.

Example of core Kanban board elements

Manufacturing was its initial home, but Agile software development teams later claimed it as their own. Recently, company units from diverse industries began to realize it.

As more and more people hear about Kanban, multiple questions arise:

• Exactly what is Kanban?
• What are the principles and practices of Kanban?
• What advantages come with implementing Kanban?

Here are the key details you should be aware of regarding the approach and its practical application.

Kanban Definition and Brief Introduction

Kanban Definition

Since the 1950s, the Japanese phrase “kanban,” which means “visual board” or a “sign,” has been used to refer to a process definition. Toyota invented it and used it as the first just-in-time factory scheduling system. The “Kanban Method,” which was initially defined in 2007, is known and connected with the capitalized term “Kanban,” on the other hand.

The Genesis of Kanban

It first emerged as a lean production scheduling method that was derived from the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota began using “just in time” manufacturing in its production in the late 1940s. The strategy resembles a pull system. This implies that rather than the usual push method of manufacturing things and pushing them to the market, production is dependent on customer demand.

Its distinctive production process served as the cornerstone for lean manufacturing. Its main objective is to reduce waste production while maintaining productivity. The fundamental objective is to increase value for the client while reducing costs.

The original Kanban System, Source: TOYOTA Global Website

The Kanban Method

Key figures in the software sector rapidly saw how Kanban could improve the delivery of goods and services at the start of the twenty-first century.

The automobile industry was the original home of Kanban, but it has since been effectively adapted to other complex commercial areas like IT, software development, R&D, and others by focusing more on efficiency and utilizing technological improvements.

In fact, the beginning of 2007 saw the emergence of what is now known as the Kanban Way. It is the culmination of many testing sessions, years of expertise, and the combined efforts of prominent members of the Lean and Agile communities, including David Anderson, Dan Vacanti, Darren Davis, Corey Ladas, Dominica DeGrandis, Rick Garber, and others.

The most basic Kanban board, with the columns “Requested,” “In Process,” and “Done,” is where you can begin constructing your Kanban system. It acts as a real-time information repository, revealing system bottlenecks and anything else that could obstruct efficient working procedures when designed, managed, and functioning properly.

But how does the Kanban method work?

Let’s discover more.

Kanban Principles

Before delving more into the Kanban values, we should make clear that the method’s development in the form that we now appreciate and employ was the result of many people working together. The growing Kanban community should recognize these concepts and contributions for what they are.

The Kanban technique was developed by David J. Anderson, a pioneer in the field of Lean/Kanban for knowledge work and one of the method’s founders, as a strategy for knowledge work organizations to implement gradual, evolutionary process and system change. Its foundations can be divided into two different categories of principles and six different practices, all of which are centered on getting things done.

Let’s look at what the principles of Kanban are.

Change Management Principles

Kanban is not a big-bang transformational model; rather, it is an evolutionary change approach that aims to incrementally and continually enhance already established processes through ongoing cooperation and feedback. Let’s examine the fundamentals of Kanban change management in more detail.

Principle 1: Start With What You Do Now

Kanban provides the freedom to deploy the methodology on top of already-in-place workflows, systems, and processes without interfering with them. The approach acknowledges that current procedures, positions, duties, and titles have importance and are generally worthwhile of preservation. Naturally, it will draw attention to problems that need to be fixed and assist with planning and assessing modifications to ensure minimal disruption during implementation.

Principle 2: Agree to Pursue Incremental, Evolutionary Change

The Kanban approach is made to encounter less opposition. By implementing collaboration and feedback forms, it promotes ongoing modest incremental and evolutionary modifications to the current process. Large-scale changes should generally be avoided since people tend to resist them out of uncertainty or fear.

Principle 3: Encourage Acts of Leadership at All Levels

People’s everyday observations and actions serve as the basis for leadership at all levels. As unimportant as you may believe it is, every shared observation encourages the continuous improvement attitude (Kaizen), which is necessary to achieve the best performance possible for a team, department, or company. This can’t be anything that management would do.

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Big Companies Using Kanban for Business Operations: Zara

The well-known apparel brand Zara employs over 17,000 people worldwide. The Kanban system has been tested for years, and it is run directly from the store level.

Zara’s processes are divided into stages like Pre Control (prioritizing), Control (now being done), and Post Control (tasks completed). They have all the data necessary on their Kanban board to decide on workflows. They are able to make more precise and better business decisions because to it.

Kanban works successfully for Zara because it improves productivity, giving staff members more time to engage in creative activities. They benefit by reducing the amount of time needed to complete tasks.

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Service Delivery Principles

The goal of Kanban is to create a service-oriented methodology. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers’ demands, establish a network of services where people may self-organize around the task, and make sure that your system is constantly evolving in order to succeed.

Principle 1: Focus on Customer’s Needs and Expectations

Each organization’s core mission should be to provide value to its customers. The quality of the services offered and the value they provide are highlighted when you are aware of your consumers’ requirements and expectations.

Principle 2: Manage the Work

By overseeing the work in your network of services, you can be confident that you’re enabling people’s natural propensities for self-organization. This makes it possible for you to concentrate on the intended results without being distracted by the “noise” that comes from micromanaging the service providers.

Principle 3: Regularly Review the Network of Services

Once established, a service-oriented strategy necessitates ongoing assessment to promote a customer service culture. Kanban promotes the improvement of the given results via the usage of routine evaluations of the network of services and evaluation of the used work policies.

Kanban Practices

Every organization that seeks to apply the Kanban approach must be cautious with the operational procedures. For an implementation to be successful, six key practices must be present. Even though mastering these is essential, it’s a lifelong effort; close to 40% of firms acknowledge that their use of the Kanban techniques is still developing. Let’s examine more closely and learn about the six Kanban practices.

Limit work in progress, manage flow, make process policies explicit, implement feedback loops, and improve collectively by visualizing the workflow.

• Visualize the workflow
• Limit work in progress
• Manage flow
• Make process policies explicit
• Implement feedback loops
• Improve collaboratively

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1. Visualize the Workflow

A simple Kanban Board

You will need a board with cards and columns if you want to use a Kanban system to illustrate your workflow. A step in your workflow is represented by each column on the board. A work item is represented by each Kanban card. The actual state of your process, complete with all of its risks and requirements, is represented by the Kanban board.

Understanding what it takes to turn a request into a deliverable product is the first and most crucial thing for you to do. By implementing well-observed and necessary adjustments, understanding how work moves through your system will put you on the road to continual improvement.

You select item X from the “To Do” column to begin working on it, and you transfer it to the “Done” column once it has been finished. This makes it simple to monitor development and identify bottlenecks. Naturally, based on your unique demands and operations, your Kanban board may have a distinct outlook.

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2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)

Digital Kanban Board with WIP Limits

Keeping a manageable amount of active tasks in progress at any given time is one of Kanban’s main goals. You are not using Kanban if there are no constraints on the amount of work-in-progress. The process will typically suffer if a team changes its emphasis midway through, and multitasking is a surefire method to produce waste and inefficiency.

By using a pull system for either individual pieces or the entire workflow, WIP can be reduced. A card is only “drawn” into the following step when there is space available thanks to the maximum items per stage setting, which prevents overflow. Such limits will rapidly highlight any flow issues so you can find and fix them.

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3. Manage Flow

It’s about managing the work, not the people, when managing the flow. By “flow,” we mean the predictable and sustainable flow of work items through the manufacturing process.

The creation of an efficient, healthy flow is one of the primary objectives when a Kanban system is put in place. You should concentrate on managing the work processes and learning how to get that work through the system more quickly rather than micromanaging people and attempting to keep them occupied all the time. As a result, your Kanban system would be producing value more quickly.

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4. Make Process Policies Explicit

Anything you don’t grasp can’t be improved. This is why it’s important to define, document, and promote your method. People wouldn’t join and take part in something they didn’t think would be beneficial.

Everyone will be able to work and make decisions that will have a good influence if they are all aware of the shared objective. Work policies have the capacity to improve people’s self-organization if they are concise, clear, well-defined, and subject to change (if/when necessary).

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5. Feedback Loops

Putting feedback loops into place is a requirement for teams and businesses looking to become more agile. They guarantee that organizations respond to possible changes appropriately and facilitate knowledge sharing among stakeholders.

Kanban recommends the use of service-oriented cadences as well as team-level cadences (feedback loops).

The daily Team Kanban Meeting for tracking the status and flow of work is an illustration of a team-level cadence. It aids in determining capacity that is available and opportunities for speeding up delivery. Each participant informs the others what they did the day before and what they would be doing today in front of the Kanban board.

Team-level cadences

Operations, service delivery, and risk meetings are a few examples of service-oriented cadences in Kanban that work to coordinate and enhance your service delivery. The results of these evaluations, such as knowledge of the obstacles to good service delivery, should be used as a decision-making input for the ongoing development of your service network.

Service-oriented cadences

While having shorter, more focused meetings on a frequent basis has been shown to be a good practice, the appropriate length of a given Kanban cycle may vary depending on your context, the size of your team, and the themes.

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6. Improve Collaboratively (Using Models & the Scientific Method)

An organization can achieve continuous improvement and long-lasting change by collectively adopting improvements based on tested scientific techniques, user feedback, and metrics.

For the development of a mindset centered on improvement through evolutionary change, it is essential to cultivate an organizational culture in which every hypothesis is demonstrated to have either favorable or unfavorable outcomes.

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Big Companies Using Kanban for Business Operations: Apple

Apple is an American multinational firm that creates and sells computer software and consumer electronics goods all over the world. With about 97,000 employees using Kanban to efficiently manage their workflow globally. Nevertheless, the modified form of Kanban utilized here is referred to as “Dynamic Kanban,” which assists staff in prioritizing work in accordance with the demands of the moment.

The Apple workflow begins with a backlog part; following that, the work is done by various teams in the “Doing” area, which leads to the “Done” portion. The business has separated the many stages of its process into “Ready,” “Doing,” and “Done” stages.

They add a card to show that each stage has been successfully completed at the end of it. It aids in maintaining attention on fresh activities and finishing them as quickly as possible. Because everyone works together to accomplish their objectives in a collaborative setting, Kanban works effectively for Apple.

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Top 6 Benefits of Kanban

According to the 1st State of Kanban report, the leading reasons for adopting the Kanban method are the need for enhanced visibility of work and continuous improvement. Let’s reveal some more of the benefits of using Kanban today.

Image Credit: State of Kanban

• Increased visibility of the flow
• Improved delivery speed
• Alignment between goals and execution
• Improved predictability
• Improved dependencies management
• Increased customer satisfaction

Increased Visibility of the Flow

Visualizing every piece of labor is the fundamental principle of Kanban. In this approach, the Kanban board becomes a focal point for information sharing and keeps everyone informed. Because all tasks are visible and never lost, the entire working process is transparent. The status of each project or task can be quickly updated for every team member.

Improved Delivery Speed

Kanban provides project managers with a variety of tools to track task distribution carefully and conduct informed analyses. The stages when jobs take the longest to complete and bottlenecks are simple to spot with a clear view of the work items done for a specific amount of time. To overcome these obstacles and ultimately increase their delivery rate, teams are given the tools they need.

Alignment between Business Goals and Execution

Kanban procedures provide for the alignment of the company’s strategic goals with the day-to-day work of teams by fostering transparency, promoting feedback, and holding regular review sessions. The business direction and execution are in line, which improves an organization’s agility. It enables teams to adjust to shifting priorities and reorganizations brought on by modifications in the market or in the needs of the customers.

Improved Predictability

You can use flow metrics to fully understand your process once you’ve created a Kanban board and begun adding work items to it. Your ability to forecast how much work you can complete in the future will be improved by looking at the amount of time tasks spend in your process (cycle time). Forecasts and judgments based on historical data will be more accurate if you understand your delivery rate consistency (throughput).

Improved Ability to Manage Scale and Dependencies

Mapping and managing dependencies both use the visualization technique that is fundamental to Kanban. Managing the flow between the current dependencies and starting with what you’re doing now entails visualizing them. Managing dependencies offers suggestions for workflow enhancement as well as insights into the current state of a workflow. On the other side, it also makes the workflow and current connections across teams completely transparent for strategic management.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Work is completed when there is a demand, according to the pull system upon which the Kanban technique is founded. In other words, by focusing only on tasks that are required right now, Kanban guides you to eliminate waste. Additionally, you may make sure that the final product meets your customer’s expectations by implementing visualization techniques and work-in-progress constraints to the process.

Scrum vs. Kanban

The main distinction between Scrum and Kanban is that the latter is a framework, whereas the former is a practice. While Scrum divides work into sprints, Kanban creates a continuous delivery paradigm where teams offer value as soon as they are prepared. Yet, it may be claimed that Kanban gives a more individualized approach whereas Scrum relies on established standards. Using either one depends on the nature of your process. The attitude and underlying philosophies of Scrum and Kanban serve as another important defining feature that sets the two apart.

According to the data in this graphic from the 14th Annual State of Agile Report by 2020 Digital.ai, Kanban is the second most widely utilized agile methodology behind Scrum. Scrumban (Kanban plus Scrum) and pure Kanban together account for 17% of all poll respondents.

Applying Kanban Across the Organization for Enterprise Agility

Kanban is a flexible approach that may be used at all organizational levels by nature. To map the management of your portfolios and link strategy to execution, use connected Kanban boards. Organizations can profit from Kanban’s concepts and practices at many management levels with the aid of the Portfolio Kanban concept.

The Portfolio Kanban approach can be used in four different forms:

• Team-level Portfolio Kanban
• Portfolio Kanban on the Project/Product level
• Portfolio Kanban on the Program level
• Portfolio Kanban on the Strategic level

Portfolio Kanban Scheme

What Are the Main Kanban Terms You Should Know?

Kanban, at its core, is a style of working that enables you to maximize the flow of value via your value streams, from ideation to customer. Kanban is more than just visualizing your work, despite the fact that it appears to be a simple solution to enhance your work processes. If you want to use the Kanban technique effectively, you must pay close attention to detail and familiarize yourself with the fundamental concepts and artifacts.

This is a quick glossary of Kanban terms to get you going.

• Kanban board: A Kanban board is one of the Kanban method’s key components and is where you visualize all work items. It should be divided into a minimum of 3 columns – Requested, In Progress, Done, representing different process stages.
• Kanban card: Kanban cards represent the different work items moving through a Kanban board. They contain important details about the tasks, such as description, deadline, size, assignees, etc.
• Columns: They split the Kanban board vertically, and each of them represents a different stage of the workflow. Each Kanban board has 3 default columns: Requested, In Progress, Done. Depending on the complexity of a work process, these three stages can be divided into many smaller sub-columns.
• Swimlanes: Horizontal lanes that split a Kanban board into sections. Teams use them to visually separate different work types on the same board and organize homogenous tasks together.
• Cycle Time: Cycle time begins at the moment when a new task enters the “in progress” stage of your workflow, and somebody is actually working on it.
• Lead Time: Lead time starts at the moment a new task is being requested (it doesn’t matter if somebody is actually working on it) and ends with its final departure from the system.
• Throughput: The number of work items passing through (completed) a system or process over a certain period. The throughput is a key indicator showing how productive your team is over time.
• Work in Progress (WIP): This is the amount of work you are currently working on, and it is not finished yet.
• WIP limits: Limiting work in progress means limiting the number of tasks your team can work on simultaneously to avoid overburdening and context-switching.
• Classes of Service: Set of policies that help Agile teams prioritize work items and projects.
• Kanban Cadences: Cyclical meetings that drive evolutionary change and “fit for purpose” service delivery.
• Kanban software: Refers to a digital system that allows the practical application of the Kanban practices and principles to be used by various teams and organizations of all sizes.

Kanban in a Nutshell

A Kanban system is more than just a wall of sticky notes. Adopting the Kanban principle and putting it to use in your daily job is the simplest way to comprehend it. The practical shift would appear reasonable and even inevitable if you read, comprehend, and agree with its fundamental ideas.

Your process will go far beyond what you could have imagined with the help of workflow visualization, defining WIP limits, regulating flow, assuring specific policies, and continuous improvement. When all of these components are organized, the true potential of Kanban will become apparent.

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Big Companies Using Kanban for Business Operations: Pixar

With more than 1500 staff members, the name Pixar is well-known in the animation and film industries. The workflows for this company’s several departments, including concept art, modeling, production management, and others, are managed using Kanban boards.

Beginning with a specific activity like “Concept Art” or “Model,” each department’s process is organized. That is, after all, the first task to show up on its Kanba