Improving Your Workflow in a Kanban Strategy
Introduction
The third core practice in Kanban is improving your workflow. It’s essential to not only visualize your work and actively manage it but also to make continuous improvements to the workflow itself. Without ongoing improvements, inefficiencies and blockages will persist, hindering the overall effectiveness of your system.
The Importance of Improving Your Workflow
It’s not enough to just see what’s happening in your system and manage the work actively. If your system is flawed or inefficient, those issues need to be addressed. Improving your workflow involves making changes to maximize the flow of value through your system. Here’s how to approach this:
- Identify and Address Blockages:
Understand why blockages occur and take steps to eliminate them.
If work is getting stuck in a particular stage, investigate the cause and adjust the process to prevent future blockages.
- Reduce Waiting Times:
A Real-Life Example of Workflow Improvement
Let me share a real-life example to illustrate how improving the workflow can significantly enhance efficiency:
I worked with a team in the US that had a Kanban board on the wall in a central corridor of their office. They faced a challenge with an approval process that created a bottleneck. The approval person only reviewed items once a week, leading to significant delays.
The Problem:
Items finished on Monday afternoon would sit for almost a week before being approved the following Monday.
This delay was costly, causing unnecessary waiting times and hindering the flow of work.
The Solution:
The team calculated the cost of items sitting and waiting for approval and displayed these financial figures on the Kanban board.
They used Post-its to highlight these costs, which increased as the week progressed.
They also created a graph to show the bad flow of work and the accumulating costs.
The Result:
The person responsible for approvals noticed the escalating costs displayed on the board and immediately understood the impact.
This visibility prompted them to change their behavior, checking for approvals every morning and evening.
This change significantly reduced the waiting times, leading to a major cost benefit for the team.
Taking Action to Improve Workflow
Improving your workflow involves more than just identifying problems. It requires taking concrete steps to address those issues:
Visualize Costs and Delays:
Use visual aids to highlight the impact of delays and blockages.
Make the costs of inefficiencies visible to everyone involved.
Encourage Proactive Behavior:
Foster a culture where team members actively look for ways to improve the workflow.
Regularly review and adjust processes to ensure they remain efficient.
Engage Stakeholders:
Involve key stakeholders in the process of identifying and addressing workflow issues.
Ensure everyone understands the impact of delays and the importance of timely approvals and actions.
Conclusion
Improving your workflow is a critical practice in Kanban that ensures your system remains efficient and effective. By identifying blockages, reducing waiting times, and making continuous improvements, you can maximize the flow of value through your system.
If you are struggling to implement a Kanban strategy, we can help or connect you with someone who can. Click the link below to get in touch and start optimizing your workflow today.
The third most powerful practice in Kaman is improving your workflow. It’s all well and good to have your visualisation so you can see everything that’s going on. It’s all well and good to actively manage the works through the system, but if your system’s broken or your system could be improved and you don’t do anything, that’s not going to bode well for the future, right?
So improving the workflow, making changes to the system in order to maximise the flow of value through the system can help us prevent things like blockages and things backing up in the system, things getting old in the system. Once you’ve identified why those things are happening, you need to actually do something. You need to actually change the system in order to make those things more effective.
So many, so many, so many teams will just sit there and they’ll understand that there’s a problem with the system and they’ll just say, “Well, we can’t do anything about it. That’s Bob. Bob is getting in the way and Bob is not doing something he’s supposed to do in a regular cadence.”
I worked with a team in the US and we had the Kaman board on the wall, right? And we couldn’t change this part of the system, okay? Because it was our Kaman, but we had a dependency, right? That might be something you actively manage away. We had a dependency on somebody else and it was basically an approval state, right? So stuff would go through our system and then at this point it had to be approved and then it would continue through our system.
The person who did the approvals didn’t want to look at the board every day, didn’t want to approve stuff every day, so he did weekly approvals. He would, every, I can’t remember what day it was, let’s say it’s Monday, every Monday he opens up the board, Monday morning, he opens up the board and approves the things that need approved. But what if we finish something Monday afternoon that sits there for seven days before it gets approved?
So what we started doing with our board was this: we were quite lucky, our board was on the wall in the main area of our business, right? In the corridor where everybody was going past, like everybody, the CEO, CFO, everybody would go past this board. And what we did was in that column, just at the bottom of that column, we started adding Post-its in there that listed financial numbers.
We kind of came up with a calculation. This was part of our actively managing how much does it cost for things to be sitting waiting to be approved. And we started putting that cost in there and those numbers would go up towards the end of the week and then they would go to zero on Monday and then they would start building up again and go to zero and start building up again.
We had a little graph showing that flow of that bad flow of work through the system and at some point that person whose job it was to approve walked past that board and kind of had a double take and kind of went, “What are these numbers?” And we just explained, “That’s the cost of these items sitting there and waiting. That’s our wait time cost.”
So we thought we would put it on the board because this is where one of our bigger costs is. And what happened? That person changed their behaviour almost immediately and started checking every morning for anything that was blocked or needed approved. In fact, I think at one point they were checking every morning and every end of day so that everything was just flowing through the system.
And that was the single biggest cost benefit that that team had in a six-month period was reducing that cost of delay of things sitting there and not being approved when they were in fact valid, they were in fact approvable, i.e., they would be approved and just waiting.
So changing your workflow or creating a situation within which that workflow is changed is one of the three most important principles of a Kaman strategy that the things you have to have in Kaman. If you’re struggling to implement a Kaman strategy, we can help or we can find somebody who can. Click the link below and get in touch.
