A Gentle Introduction to Kanban Framework

Kanban Framework:

A Gentle Introduction to Kanban Framework, Kanban is a well-known lightweight workflow management strategy for establishing, managing, and optimizing knowledge work services. It helps you visualize work, maximize productivity and continuously improve. Kanban boards represent work, allowing you to maximize work output across many teams and manage even the most complicated projects in one place.

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Origin of Kanban:

“Kanban” is a Japanese term meaning “display board” or “sign”. It was invented by a Japanese engineer named Taiichi Ohno in the late 1940s and used by Toyota as a planning system for a practice called just-in-time production (JIT).

Toyota wanted to improve their design and manufacturing processes. Grocery stores are using a “pull” manufacturing technique, where they allocate their inventory based on expected consumer demand to avoid overstocking items, company management said. Toyota chose this “just-in-time” manufacturing concept (as mentioned above) and introduced it at its main plant in 1953.The Kanban process emerged from this adjustment.

“Kanban is a pull system”: What does that mean?

A pull system is a lean approach to controlling workflow by replacing completed work. A vending machine is a good example of a pull system, as items are only replenished when they run out. Kanban fits this concept perfectly.

Unlike Scrum or Agile, which focus on sprints and iterations, Kanban treats work statuses. Kanban focuses on breaking work into small tasks, visualizing them, and keeping the number of things to a minimum at each stage of work.

Work on the Kanban board from left to right. When you have completed all your current tasks or if you have an urgent task, select the job from the column on your left. Work-in-progress restrictions help you enforce this.

What are the principles of the Kanban Framework?

The Kanban technique was developed by David J. Anderson (a pioneer in Lean/Kanban for knowledge work and one of the founding fathers of the method) as an approach to incremental, evolutionary process and system change for business knowledge work. Its core can be divided into two types of principles: change management principles and service delivery principles, and it focuses on getting things done.

1. Change management principles:

Let’s look at the Kanban change management ideas in more detail.

First Principle: Begin with what you’re doing right now.

Kanban allows you to transfer the approach to current workflows, systems and procedures without disrupting the status quo. Existing procedures, positions, responsibilities and titles are valued and must be preserved depending on the technology. Of course, it will bring to light issues that need to be addressed and help evaluate and plan for changes to ensure they are implemented as smoothly as possible.

Second Principle: Agree to Work Towards Gradual, Evolutionary Change.

The Kanban approach should encounter as little resistance as possible. The inclusion of forms for collaboration and feedback encourages small incremental and evolutionary changes to the current process. Major changes are generally avoided as they are often rejected out of fear or insecurity.

Third Principle: At all levels, encourage acts of leadership.

Leadership at all levels is based on people’s daily observations and actions to improve their working conditions. Each shared observation, no matter how trivial, encourages an attitude of continuous improvement (kaizen) to achieve optimal performance at the team/department/company level. This cannot be a management level task.

2. Service Delivery principles:

Kanban strives to create a service-oriented mindset. It requires a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, creating a service network where people organize themselves around the task, and continually evolving your system.

First Principle: Concentrate on the needs and expectations of your customers.

The focus of any organization should be on providing value to their customers. When you understand the needs and expectations of your customers, you draw attention to the quality of the services you provide and the value you provide.

Second Principle: Organize Your Work

When you manage work in your utility grid, you enable people to organize around work. This allows you to focus on intended outcomes and not the “noise” created by service provider micromanagement.

Third Principle: Examine the Service Network regularly.

In order to build a customer service culture, a service-oriented strategy needs to be evaluated regularly after it has been developed. Kanban encourages improvement of the delivered results by conducting frequent service network assessments and an assessment of the working rules used.

The working of the Kanban Board:

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The Kanban board is vital to the Kanban system. It’s a program that visualizes the entire project and allows users to track its progress. A new member or an external entity can use the graphical style of Kanban boards to understand what is happening and complete tasks and upcoming tasks.

The Kanban board is an agile project management tool to visualize work, limit work in progress and increase workflow (or efficiency). Use cards, columns, and continuous improvement to help technology and service teams get the right amount of work done and done.

Separate columns are linked, and tasks range from the leftmost column (Upcoming Tasks) to the rightmost column (Completed Tasks). The Kanban system uses the term “work in progress” to track the progress of a work cycle. WIP contains a number of parameters and a default state.

One of the basic ideas that governs the Kanban process in Agile is to limit WIP to maintain consistent standards. The team must complete the current tasks in the given order.

The Kanban board is split in half by a man named David Anderson. Examples include visual cues, columns, work-in-progress constraints, a commitment point, and a delivery point.

Let us discuss the practices of the Kanban framework in detail to understand their significance.

Practices of Kanban Framework:

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1. Visualize the flow of work: 

The visualization of the workflow is the first and most important step in the introduction and implementation of the Kanban method. You need to map out the process steps you are now using to deliver your work or services, either on a real board or on an electronic Kanban board.

Your kanban board can be very simple or very extensive, depending on the complexity of your process and your work mix. Once you’ve visualized your process, you can see the work you and your team are now doing. This can be in the form of stickers or cards with different colors to represent different classes of service or simply different types of work assignments.

2. Limit Work in Progress (use the columns): 

Implementing Kanban, a “pull system,” requires limiting work in progress (WIP). Limit WIP encourages your team to complete current work before moving on to new projects. Consequently, the work in progress must be completed and acknowledged as complete. This expands the capacity of the system and allows the team to take on more tasks.

Setting your WIP limits can be difficult at first. You can launch with no WIP restrictions. When your team starts using Kanban, you can get started with no WIP limits and just view the first work in progress. Once you’ve gathered enough information, set WIP limits for each process step (each column on your Kanban board) equal to half the average WIP.

Many teams start by setting a WIP limit of 1 to 1.5 times the number of people working on a given stage. Capping WIP and putting WIP limits in each column on the board not only helps team members finish what they’re working on before moving on to new work, but it also conveys to customers and other stakeholders that every team has limited ability to do the job and that they must carefully plan what work they assign to the team.

3. Manage the Flow:

Once you establish the first two principles, the essence of your Kanban system is managing and increasing flow. By showing the many steps of the workflow and the status of work at each stage, a Kanban system helps with input flow management. Depending on how effectively you specify your process and configure your WIP limits, you’ll see things running smoothly within your WIP limits or work building up when something stops and starts to take capacity.

All of this affects how quickly work moves from the beginning to the end of the process (some call it a value stream). Kanban helps your team analyze the system and make changes to improve the flow and reduce the time it takes to complete each task.

Observing the intermediate waits and how long work items stay in these “transfer” states is an important part of this process of observing your work and resolving/removing bottlenecks. As you will see, minimizing the time spent in these wait phases is critical to reducing cycle time. Your team’s task completion becomes smoother and more predictable as workflow improves.

4. Make Process Policies Explicit: 

It’s a good idea to describe and visualize your guidelines for your work as part of your process visualization. Provides a common ground for all participants to understand how each type of work is performed in the system by defining specific process rules.

Board policies, Swimlane policies, and policies for each column are all possible. There can be anything from a checklist of actions that need to be completed for each type of work item, to entry and exit criteria for each column, and anything else that helps team members effectively manage the flow of work.