Actively Managing Your Workflow in a Kanban Strategy
Introduction
Once you have defined and visualized your workflow, the next critical step in a Kanban strategy is to actively manage the work within your workflow. This means being proactive and engaged with the process, ensuring that the flow of work remains smooth and efficient.
The Importance of Active Management
Active management is essential because it prevents you from being a passive observer of your workflow. It’s not enough to simply visualize your work; you need to take action to optimize the process. Here’s how to effectively manage your workflow:
- Monitor Work in Progress (WIP):
Adjust the amount of work in progress to ensure optimal flow.
If there are too many tasks in a particular area, reduce the WIP to prevent bottlenecks.
Conversely, if there are idle resources, increase the WIP to keep everyone productive.
- Prevent Piling Up of Work:
Identifying and Addressing Issues
Active management involves regularly reviewing your workflow and addressing any issues that arise:
Aging Work Items:
Identify items that have been active for an unusually long time.
Investigate why these items are stuck and take steps to move them towards completion.
Blocked Items:
Clearly indicate blocked items on your board.
Develop strategies to unblock these items and get them moving through the system again.
Clogged Workflow:
Treat your workflow like a pipe that can get clogged.
Actively work to remove any blockages to ensure a smooth flow of work.
Taking Action
Here are some specific actions you can take to actively manage your workflow:
Review and Adjust:
Regularly review your Kanban board and adjust WIP limits as necessary.
Ensure that tasks are moving smoothly through each stage of the workflow.
Resolve Blockages:
Develop a process for quickly addressing and resolving blocked items.
This might involve cross-functional collaboration or additional resources to clear the blockage.
Optimize Flow:
Continuously look for ways to optimize the flow of work.
Use metrics and data from your Kanban board to make informed decisions about process improvements.
Conclusion
Active management is a core practice in Kanban that ensures your workflow remains efficient and effective. By regularly reviewing your workflow, addressing bottlenecks, and optimizing the flow of work, you can maximize the value delivered to your customers.
If you are struggling to implement a Kanban strategy, we can help or connect you with someone who can. Click on the link below to get in touch and start optimizing your workflow today.
Once you’ve defined and visualised your workflow, the next most important thing you can do in a Kanban strategy is to actively manage the work within your workflow. That means that you are not just a bystander to the process. The people that are participating in the process are not just sitting there looking at a piece of work going, “Yeah, that’s not working very well,” and not doing anything about it. The core practice here is to actively manage that.
This means that if we’re finding that we’ve got too many things going on in a particular area, perhaps we should reduce our work in process. If we’ve got lots of folks sitting about doing nothing in a particular area because we don’t have enough work, perhaps we should increase the amount of work. Actively manage your WIP. You want to avoid work piling up anywhere in your system.
So if you’re viewing your visualisation of your Kanban and you see lots of things piling up before another group, another team, another process, what are you going to do about it? You can’t just sit there and watch it pile up. That’s not going to help us maximise the flow and the amount of value that we deliver. We need to do something about it. We need to go and figure out what the problem is. We need to change our system in order to make it better.
Making sure we don’t have stuff pile up and making sure something doesn’t sit there for ages is part of actively managing your work. There are so many teams that I work with where we start looking at this data, and the first thing I’ll say is, “Why has this thing been active for 250 days?” It’s something that’s either fallen through the cracks, or it’s some kind of bucket piece of work that exists forever, or it’s just something that’s taken a really long time because it’s got blocked, or we didn’t understand it, or any of those things.
Why is it still sitting there? How can we make it go away? How can we move it towards completion? If we have a history of things taking a long time, then we need to do something about that. If items on your board are blocked, how are you visualising and indicating that they’re blocked? That was the first practice, but what are you going to do about it? Are you just going to sit there and go, “Yeah, we’ve got all this blocked stuff, let’s move on and work on something else?” No, you need to actively manage the blocked items.
How do we unblock them? How do we unstick them? How do we get them moving through the system again? It’s kind of like having a pipe. If the pipe gets clogged with whatever it is that’s clogging the pipe, it’s difficult for other things to move around it because our attention is continuously pulled in different directions. So we want to actively work to get rid of those blockages.
Anything that’s blocked, anything that’s slow moving and getting old sitting there, and anything that is piling up—something that’s stuck—usually things pile up behind blocked stuff. All of those things are required for you to be actively managing your work in a Kanban strategy. If you’re struggling to implement a Kanban strategy, we can help or help you find somebody who can. Click on the link below and get in touch.
