Embracing Kanban: A Creative Approach to Workflow Optimization
Introduction
Kanban is gaining popularity across various industries, especially the creative sector. Whether you’re building computer games, crafting marketing content, or producing videos, Kanban offers a flexible and effective strategy for optimizing your workflow. In this blog post, we’ll delve into why Kanban is so well-suited for creative work, how it can be implemented, and why it’s not just about having a board on the wall.
Why Kanban is Ideal for Creative Industries
Creative industries often face unique challenges that traditional frameworks like Scrum may not adequately address. Here’s why Kanban is becoming the go-to strategy:
Flexibility: Unlike Scrum, which many perceive as a software engineering process, Kanban can be adapted to any type of work, making it ideal for creative tasks.
Non-Disruptive: Kanban allows you to start from your existing workflow, minimizing disruption while gradually introducing improvements.
The Challenges of Applying Scrum to Creative Work
Scrum can be challenging to implement in creative environments due to its structured nature and emphasis on teamwork over individual creativity. Creative work is often personal and iterative, which can clash with Scrum’s team-oriented processes.
Individual vs. Team Focus: Creativity is highly individual, and Scrum’s focus on the team can be at odds with this. Kanban, on the other hand, can be tailored to individual workflows.
Resistance to Change: Many creative professionals are hesitant to adopt frameworks that impose significant changes to their existing processes.
Getting Started with Kanban
Kanban’s beauty lies in its simplicity and flexibility. Here’s how you can get started:
- Define Your Workflow:
Documenting Your Process: The first step is to write down your current way of working. This documentation forms the foundation of your Kanban system.
Common Misunderstandings: Many teams think that simply having a board with moving cards is Kanban, but it’s much more than that.
- Visualization:
Create a Board: Use a physical board or digital tools like JIRA or Trello to visualize your workflow.
Work In Progress (WIP) Limits: Establish WIP limits to prevent overloading your system. This ensures work moves smoothly through each stage.
- Monitor and Adapt:
Collect Data: Use Kanban metrics to track the flow of work and identify bottlenecks.
Continuous Improvement: Regularly review your workflow and make adjustments based on the data to optimize your process.
The Personal Nature of Creative Work
Creative work is inherently personal, and Kanban respects this by allowing individuals to tailor their workflows to their needs while still aligning with team objectives.
Personal Kanban: Each team member can have their own personal Kanban board, ensuring they can work in a way that suits them best while still contributing to the overall project goals.
Team Agreements: While individual workflows are respected, it’s essential to have team agreements on how work is chosen and prioritized to ensure coherence and efficiency.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Implementing Kanban is not without its challenges. Here are some common pitfalls and how to avoid them:
Lack of Definition: Failing to define your workflow can lead to inconsistencies. Ensure you document and agree on your process.
Ignoring WIP Limits: Without WIP limits, you risk overloading your system. Stick to the limits to maintain a steady flow of work.
Insufficient Monitoring: Regularly review and analyze your workflow to identify and address issues promptly.
Why Kanban is Not Just a Board
A common misconception is that Kanban is merely about having a board with columns and moving cards. In reality, it involves much more:
Definition of Workflow: Clearly define each stage of your process and ensure everyone on the team understands it.
Active Management: Continuously monitor and adjust your workflow based on data and team feedback.
Conclusion
Kanban is an incredibly versatile and powerful strategy for optimizing workflows, especially in creative industries. By starting from your current process and gradually introducing improvements, Kanban minimizes disruption and enhances efficiency.
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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.
I think Caman is becoming popular in the creative industries because there’s very little other help out there for the creative type work where you’re, for example, building computer games or you’re building marketing content or you’re building videos. Whatever it is that you’re building, that’s not really software engineering, because everybody thinks of Scrum as a software engineering process and find it a little bit weird trying to apply it within their context. Right? They actually, they’re actually running into the same thing that everybody runs into, that doesn’t, that would, things don’t work that way here. So Caman is a much better starting point for getting into making changes to the way that you work and trying to optimise your processes.
So coming up with that definition of workflow for your existing process is usually much easier than trying to apply something like Scrum. So for lots of organisations, they don’t want that big bang change. Right? When you apply something like Scrum, you’re making a leap from the way you currently work and changing it to something else, and this is going to be your starting point. So that would be you start at Scrum and then you’re going to move forward from there and optimise. You’re still going to use Cban Caman strategy and you’re going to optimise from there. But if your way of working right now is kind of working and you don’t want to disrupt that too much or you don’t feel you don’t know if you’re going to get value from that Scrum thing, then start from where you are. Right? That’s the beauty of a Caman strategy is it doesn’t care what the, it doesn’t care the way your system currently works. You model your existing system, that’s where you start from.
So you can take any industry, any system, creative or otherwise, and you can just model your existing system. A huge difficulty though, I’ve worked in quite a few creative, I’ve worked in the creative industry. Right? When I first started as a software engineer after I graduated back in 2000, my first jobs were New Media agencies. You probably wouldn’t call them that anymore, but New Media agencies. I worked with groups of designers building Flash applications, Flash websites, if anybody remembers Flash. If not, don’t even look at it, it’s mental. And those kind of things, working with the creative industry, it’s a very difficult space because of the way art works. Right? It’s very difficult to be iterative and incremental right away in that space because the way we traditionally work with art is it’s your personal thing, and your personal thing is going to a certain point till you’re personally happy with it, and then you’re providing it to other people to give you feedback and that kind of thing.
So there’s a much more personal nature to that than there is in maybe other industries like software engineering, right? Where there’s less, a little bit less personal. It can still be personal, but a little bit less personal. So that’s why creative industries and creative folks struggle with something like Scrum, because it talks about team, it doesn’t talk about individual, and creativity is about the individual. So finding the balance in that is very standoffish. So Caman strategy, but the hardest part of a Caman strategy, at least at the beginning, is writing down your workflow. Right? Documenting your definition of workflow. How are you going to get five creative people in a room and agree what your existing workflow is? So that’s going to be your first struggle. But Caman is popular in creative industries because it seems like actually, I’m actually going to recant some of that a little bit. I think that Caman is popular in a lot of places where people don’t want to change, and they see Scrum has a bunch of rules, and Caman doesn’t have a bunch of rules, and they feel like they can just put a board on the wall, call it Caman, and they’re done.
That’s not Caman. Having a board on the wall and moving cards across it is one very small part of Caman, maybe an important part, that visualisation part. But have you taken the time to actually define your workflow? To agree as a group, all the people working together, that this is how we are all going to act, how we’re all going to make decisions in the same way? I doubt that happens in most organisations. Have you agreed what the working process limits are? How much work is going to sit in each column? If you don’t have WIP limits, you ain’t got Cban at all. Right? So sitting down and agreeing that this is really hard stuff. It’s hard for a group of people to get together and make these decisions and come up with these rationales. It’s just hard. I do workshops with groups of people talking about this stuff, and you can do a four-hour workshop with a group of five or six people and not get anywhere near a definition of workflow. Nowhere near. And this is people who largely agree on what it is they’re doing, because the devil’s in the details. Right? When you’ve got a bunch of work in a pile and you need to start a new piece of work, how do you choose that piece of work?
How do you choose it? Right? We have to agree as a group how we’re going to choose it, because this is our system that we’re all working within. So how, whose way of choosing it do we pick? Right? Out of the five different opinions on how they select work. Well, I like this type of work, so I’m going to take that. No, that’s not good enough. That’s not how you optimise a system. Right? That’s not how you optimise the flow of work through a system. What is the most valuable piece of work to take next? Now that’s an interesting conversation. And how do you define value? And does it matter whether you as an individual are comfortable with that piece of work or not? Right? There’s probably some yes, some no, right? Within the bounds of that. So making these agreements and writing them down is very hard. And although Caman has become popular, particularly in the creative industry, I definitely feel there’s a lot of “Can’t Ban,” right? That they really don’t want to do anything or change anything or have anything imposed upon them and their way of working.
I know a lot of creatives, creatives are very much, very much, “My way of working is the best for me. That’s how my muse.” Right? And that’s absolutely reasonable. But we’re all working together within a business driving a particular outcome, and that business needs to optimise the work in order to maximise the return on investment. Right? So how much effort we spend versus how much money we get. And yeah, we need some level of standardisation, and a core critical part of Caman is defining that standardisation. Have personal Caman. If you don’t want to work together as a team, each individual has their own Cban. Problem solved. Right? Everybody just decides their own way of working, their own workflow, as long as they define it, they write it down, they have the visualisation, limit their work in process. Personal Caman. There’s a book on personal Caman, and I highly recommend that as well.
So I know Caman’s getting popular, but please do look at the Cang guides. Right? Take a look at the Cang guides, look at what is actually involved in creating a Caman or using a Caman strategy against your work. And usually, there’s more rigor, more effort, more ambiguity, and more difficulty than something like Scrum. If your current system of work is failing you, then you would benefit from creating and applying a Caman strategy. Our professional Caman trainers and consultants are ready to help. Don’t wait. The sooner you get started, the sooner you will improve. Get in touch below.
