Demystifying Kanban: A Strategy for Continuous Improvement
Introduction
Kanban is often misunderstood as just a system for delivering work. However, at its core, Kanban is a strategy designed to help you understand and optimize your existing processes. In this blog post, we’ll explore what Kanban really is, how it functions, and why it can be a game-changer for any team or organization.
What is Kanban?
Kanban is not a system for delivering stuff; it’s a strategy for improving your workflow. It allows you to monitor and optimize any existing system, making it more efficient and effective.
Common Misunderstandings: Many think Kanban is a rigid system. In reality, it’s a flexible strategy that can be applied to various workflows.
Core Function: Kanban helps you see your current processes clearly and make informed changes to improve them.
The Mechanics of Kanban
Kanban works by bringing rigor, metrics, and analysis to your workflow, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. Here’s a step-by-step guide to how it works:
- Define Your Workflow:
Initial Step: Write down how you currently work. This might seem simple, but it’s crucial for understanding and optimizing your system.
Why It Matters: Documenting your process ensures everyone is on the same page and helps identify areas for improvement.
- Visualize Your Work:
- Monitor and Adapt:
Kanban in Action: Real-World Applications
Kanban isn’t limited to any specific type of work. It can be applied to various domains, from software engineering to supermarket checkouts.
Universal Application: Whether it’s an engineering team, a creative team, or even a checkout system at a supermarket, Kanban can bring rigor and clarity.
Example: At the beginning of any Kanban implementation, teams create a “definition of workflow,” essentially writing down their current way of working. This simple act can uncover inefficiencies and standardize processes.
The Power of Visual Management
Visual management is a critical aspect of Kanban. Humans are naturally good at spotting visual discrepancies, making it easier to identify problems and opportunities for improvement.
Example: Imagine playing Monopoly without the rulebook. Everyone would play differently, leading to confusion. Similarly, a team without a documented workflow will face inconsistencies.
Benefit: Visualizing work helps teams spot issues quickly and make necessary adjustments.
Continuous Improvement with Kanban
Kanban promotes continuous improvement through a cycle of monitoring, analyzing, and adapting the workflow.
- Start Where You Are:
- Make Incremental Changes:
Small Adjustments: Gradually refine your workflow based on the data and insights you gather.
Example: If you notice that a particular stage in your workflow is causing delays, make changes and monitor the impact.
- Apply Little’s Law:
- Continuous Loop: Use the principles of Little’s Law to guide your improvements, ensuring that each change leads to better flow and efficiency.
Why Kanban is Essential
If your current system is failing, implementing a Kanban strategy can lead to significant improvements. Don’t wait for problems to become crises. The sooner you start with Kanban, the sooner you’ll see positive changes.
- Call to Action: Ready to transform your workflow with Kanban? Contact us to get started with world-class training and consulting.
Conclusion
Kanban is more than just a method for managing work. It’s a powerful strategy for continuous improvement, applicable to any system or workflow. By defining your workflow, visualizing your work, and continuously adapting based on data, you can achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in your processes.
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Recommended Resources:
Kanban Training: Check out our Pro Kanban training programs.
Consulting Services: Need help implementing Kanban? Our experts are here to guide you.
Further Reading: Explore more about Kanban and agile methodologies on our blog.
What is Caman? There are lots of different definitions of Caman, and there are lots of misunderstandings about what Cban is. At its core, Caman is a strategy, not an actual system of delivering stuff. That’s one of the common misunderstandings of Cban: that it’s a system of delivering stuff. It’s not; it’s a strategy to help you understand your existing system of delivering stuff and help you optimise that system of delivering stuff.
Quite often, I’ll sometimes describe it as a meta process. It’s a process that lets you monitor a process, which just messes with people’s heads. But effectively, Caman brings some rigor, some metrics, and some analysis of those metrics to allow you or your team or your organisation to look at any system and what’s happening in that system and adapt it in a good way. You can see when we make a change to the system, how does that affect the data? How does that affect the flow of work through that system? If you’ve made a positive impact, you keep doing that thing, and if you’ve made a negative impact, you stop doing that thing. Go back to the old way.
You could also say that Caman is a work-limited pool system, but that’s a little bit… nobody understands that terminology. The easiest way to describe it is it’s a way of looking at your existing system and helping you, as an individual, ask more interesting questions about how that system goes together in order to have a more optimal system to have work flow through your system more effectively.
A Cban strategy can be applied to any system; it doesn’t matter what the system is. If the stuff going through a system, whether that is a checkout at a supermarket—that’s a system with stuff flowing through it—or your engineering team and you’ve got work flowing through it, or your creative team and you’ve got work flowing through it, it doesn’t matter what your system is. Cban brings that Caman strategy that you apply, bringing a little bit of rigor to that system and some metrics that allow you to monitor that system.
For example, one of the key things that happens at the beginning of any CAND discussion is that you create what Cbang calls a definition of workflow. All that means is you write down how you work. That’s it; that’s all the definition of workflow is. You’ve got your way of working for a particular thing that you do. It could be a team with work going through it, it could be a machine that processes something, or it could be a checkout at a supermarket. You write down the way everything works in that system because what a lot of people… even just the act of doing that can create optimisations in the system.
If you’ve got five people working in a system and you’ve never written down how that system works, what do you think the chances are that everybody working in that system uses the same terminology, makes the same or similar decisions, applies the same rules to playing the game? Yeah, that’s a great example, actually. I like that one as well. So if you went out and bought Monopoly—I’m not suggesting it, by the way; there are way better games than that—but if you did buy it because it’s the most common thing, right? You can find it in every supermarket. If you went out and bought Monopoly and you immediately tore up the rule book and you just guessed how to play the game, and you had four people playing the game and everybody just guessed… Monopoly is a good one because everybody knows how Monopoly kind of works, right?
Would everybody be playing the same game? Would everybody be playing by the same rules? Would everybody have the same understanding of the mechanisms of the game and how it actually works? No, they wouldn’t, right? They would each come up with their own way of doing it. If you’ve ever been at one of those family dues where you’ve got Monopoly out, you argue over how the rules work. You argue as a group, as a family, about how you should play the game because you’ve not agreed as a group how to play it. That’s what the rule book that comes with a game is: here’s the way you play the game.
So where’s the rule book for your team, for the way your team works? Where’s the rule book? When a new team member comes in, do they also just make up how they work, and then you tell them when they’re doing it wrong, and hopefully, they end up figuring out how to do it right? It doesn’t make any sense. You write it down.
What that typically looks like… we’ve all seen what a lot of people do: they draw a board on the wall or in JIRA or in Azure DevOps, and it has a bunch of columns, and they call that CAND. That’s not a CAND strategy; that’s just a board. Anybody can have a board and have work flow through the board. Part of the CAND is deciding and agreeing what that workflow is. Once you’ve agreed what that workflow is, you can then apply some metrics and monitor what’s going on in that workflow.
Once you’re monitoring what’s going on in that workflow, just looking at the data is not enough. Remember, you have to actively manage the work that’s going through the system. You actively make choices about what is happening within the system in order to optimise the outcome. Then you’re going to look at the data to improve the system. You look at the data, and then you actively make changes to the workflow.
So you’ve written down how you think you work right now. That’s where you start. There’s an expression they use in Caman: start from where you are. That’s the expression. So where you are is what you do right now. Write down what you do right now; that’s your current definition of workflow. You build the board, you visualise your work in process, your work that’s going on, and then you start using it. You’re like, “Oh crap, we didn’t think about this. Oh, that doesn’t quite work like that.” So you start making changes so that it more accurately reflects your definition of workflow.
Because you’re visualising your work, you start noticing things. Humans are really good at visual seeing when things aren’t quite right or the way you think they should be. Then you can go look at the data and say, “No, no, no, we should actually change this. We shouldn’t have two columns; we should have one,” or “We shouldn’t have one column; we should have two.” Then you make those decisions. You’re changing your workflow, you’re actively managing your work, and you’re changing your workflow.
That’s what creates this continuous improvement loop of optimising your process. Making a little change: did we make it better? Yes? Awesome! Let’s see what’s going on. Okay, we use it for a while. But this is still broken; this doesn’t work right. Okay, well, let’s fix it. Let’s try something different. Okay, now does that work? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that works great.
This application of… it’s actually an application of Little’s Law; you can go look that up later. This application of a CAND strategy to any system will help improve it. If your current system of work is failing you, then you would benefit from creating and applying a CAND strategy. Don’t wait; the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll improve. Get in touch below.
