Why is Kanban such a popular approach for people in creative industries?

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4 minute read

Creativity, with its boundless landscape, where every spark of inspiration has the potential to morph into a magnum opus, often thrives in a state of organised chaos.  

But when the whirlwind of creative brilliance threatens to scatter ideas like leaves in a storm, Kanban steps forward as the beacon of method in the madness. 🎨 

Embracing Kanban in the Creative Process 

The allure of Kanban within creative spheres is undeniable. It elegantly: 

  • 🗂️ Reflects existing workflows without demanding upheaval 

  • 🔄 Reduces variability, fostering a cohesive approach 

  • 🤔 Encourages collective decision-making on task priorities 

  • ⌛ Prioritises the reduction of cycle times for efficiency 

Let’s venture deeper into these facets: 

A Mirror to Creativity’s Rhythm 

Creatives often buck against the confines of structure and time sheets. Kanban, however, doesn’t impose; it maps. It’s the cartographer of creativity, charting the journey of concepts from their genesis to their unveiling. 📍  

By mapping your process as is, it acts not just as a reflector but as an enhancer of your team’s creative heartbeat. 

Smoothing Out the Creative Current 

Where variability is the norm, predictability becomes the coveted prize. In a milieu where ten minds might pursue ten different paths, Kanban orchestrates a symphony from the potential cacophony.  

It proposes a simple question: “What if our choices align?” 🧩 This alignment nurtures creativity rather than constricting it, ensuring that no idea is left to wither in obscurity. 

Crafting a Unified Creative Selection 

Consider an orchestra sans conductor—utter bedlam. In a creative team, Kanban wields the baton. By agreeing that tasks which have lingered longest take precedence, every idea is ensured its moment in the spotlight.  

This isn’t just about being fair; it’s about being efficient and client-centric. 🎵 

The Metronome of Creative Delivery 

Kanban’s spell lies in its fixation with cycle times. It’s akin to a metronome for musicians, providing a tempo for the creative ensemble, ensuring that projects glide through the system in a rhythmic cadence. 🎹 

Kanban Across Diverse Industries 

The Kanban revelation isn’t limited to marketing or tech. Take a dentist, for instance. If a dental practice can employ Kanban to minimise appointment lead times, creative industries can surely harness it for more agile content delivery. 

Here’s how different sectors can orchestrate their workflows with Kanban: 

🦷 Dentistry 

  • Scheduling Sonata: Craft Kanban cards for each patient journey: scheduling, confirmation, treatment, and follow-up, dramatically cutting the waiting period. 

📹 Marketing 

  • Content Crescendo: Sort ideas by stages: conception, in progress, review, and distribution, ensuring a seamless content symphony. 

Implementing Kanban in the Creative Sector: Practical Steps 

How, then, do we integrate this into the free-spirited world of creative industries?  

Here’s a brief ‘how-to’ concerto: 

🎼 Mapping Your Creative Cadence 

  • Draft a visual representation of your current creative process. 

  • Divide the journey of a project into distinct, manageable movements from inception to applause. 

🔄 Synchronising Task Selection 

  • As a collective, harmonise on how tasks will be selected. By urgency? By age? 

  • Establish a ‘pull system’ where new tasks are only taken up once the current ones are concluded. 

⏲️ Tempo of Tasks 

  • Monitor the time each task dwells at each stage to identify and smooth out any dissonance. 

  • Hold frequent retrospectives to refine your rhythm and keep the tempo upbeat. 

📈 Charting Continuous Improvement 

  • Employ data from your Kanban board to direct your orchestral adjustments. 

  • Trial small tweaks, measuring their impact on your cadence, and adjust your score accordingly. 

Case Studies: Kanban’s Creative Concert

  • A design team employs Kanban to visualise their artistic endeavour, enabling quicker turnovers and accelerated client nods. 

  • A production squad aligns on editing priorities, making video releases sleeker and boosting customer satisfaction. 

Kanban: The Maestro of the Creative Symphony 

Kanban doesn’t just streamline; it leads. It transforms creative chaos into a coherent composition—collaborative, continuous, and always on cue. 

As those in the creative sector embrace Kanban, an epiphany unfolds: a framework can indeed liberate creativity. And with Kanban, this framework is as adaptable as it is sturdy, resonating with the dynamic tempo of creative work.

I think Kanban is hugely popular in all industries, not just creative industries, because it does model the behaviour of the existing system. Right? It doesn’t require you to change how you’re currently doing things. So effectively, when you’re implementing a Kanban approach, you start from where you are. You model your existing system, right? And in modelling your existing system, you actually iron out some variability. Because if you’ve got 10 people in your organisation that are, let’s say, our output is marketing videos, right? Marketing content for businesses that we’re working with, then, and we’ve got 10 people working on that marketing content, how does each person choose what the next thing is they go work on? If every person picks differently, right? Makes choices differently, then we’ve got a high degree of variability in our system that we can iron out. Right? If all these 10 people just got together and agreed whatever thing is in our list of things to do that’s been sitting there the longest, let’s do that. Right? That way, the oldest thing is the quickest thing to get through the system because you’re trying to reduce your overall cycle time, right, for your customers. Then you can use Kanban to model your system, right? You have that conversation: what is our working agreement? What is our definition of workflow for our system? You model it, decide when it starts, when it finishes, and then you’ve got the data to figure out when we make changes, is it improving the system or is it not improving the system?

Actually, I had this conversation a couple of months ago with my dentist, right? So totally nothing to do with software, nothing to do with it, nothing to do with any of those industries. If you’re a dentist, right, you have to book people in for appointments. How quickly can you book people in for appointments? So if I say to my dentist, I need an appointment, and it’s three months out, right? That’s a very long time, right? So their cycle time, their ability to get something into the system, I’ve asked for an appointment and be able to actually deliver it, is really, really long. Really long. What could they do to shorten that cycle time? Well, perhaps they need little gaps in their calendar to be able to have things that pop in. Perhaps they need to deal with cancellations better. Perhaps they can chase people to say, do you still need this appointment? All those kinds of things, right? But how do they know that that’s effective? How do they know that it’s valuable and it’s changing the way they do business? Right? Because wouldn’t it be great if you went to the dentist and said, I need an appointment, and they said, yeah, we’ve got one next Thursday for you, right? That would be great.

So having a model for your system so you can monitor the flow of work through your system and look at your cycle times, look at your throughput, look at how long things are taking. Because the shorter the throughput, quite often, the shorter the cycle time, right? People getting into the system and getting through it quicker. And I’ll tell you something: people are happier customers if they get their stuff faster. And that’s what we’re looking at. We’re looking at that continuous flow, continuous delivery of stuff. Whatever stuff’s in your system, we want to deliver it as quickly as possible.

Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else, Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.

Throughput People and Process Cycle Time Flow Efficiency Agile Frameworks Operational Practices Pragmatic Thinking Metrics and Learning Lean Organisational Physics

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