Although its roots are in manufacturing, Kanban has become a popular way for software development and support teams to organise their work. But the truth is that it can be applied to almost any team or business. Read on and I’ll explain why.
What is Kanban?
Kanban is really a way of managing workflow, based on lean manufacturing. It came out of Toyota in Japan as a way of reducing the waste in their manufacturing process, as a way of ensuring they had the materials they needed for their manufacturing lines available when they needed them. David J Anderson was the pioneer for the use of Kanban in software engineering, and making it a widely used framework.
In workflow systems, a card represents a piece of work to be done. A Kanban board is structured so that a series of columns shows the different stages a piece of work needs to go through to be completed. A card starts in the backlog, and then is moved into the next column when a particular stage is completed. A simple Kanban board will have three columns; ‘To do’, ‘In progress’, and ‘Done’. Since people can only handle a limited number of tasks at a time, you need to set a limit on the number of items in the ‘In progress’ column. Items are ‘pulled’ between the stages – once you finish an item, you pull one from the To Do column into the In Progress column and start working on it.
What is a Kanban card?
The Kanban card is a card that represents a work item. It can be a physical card, such as a sticky note or palm card, or a virtual one such as one from Jira, Asana, etc.
On the Kanban card it should have a short description of the task, the date it was created, the due date, and the task owner.
Here’s an example of a simple Kanban card:
But what about my teams workflow?
The work your team does will inevitably go through a number of stages before it is completed. Orders come in, you fulfill the order from the stock you have, you pack it, and ship it. HR departments processing applications for a position need to write a position description, a job ad, advertise for the position, collate applications, review, shortlist, interview, do reference checks and agree on who to make the offer to. Even small two to three person companies have a number of things they need to take care of, and having them on the board helps everyone else to know what is going on and the progress of each item.
Once you start visualising your workflow from start to finish, you can also start trying to find inefficiencies, stages where time is wasted, bottlenecks, and areas where things always need to be harder than they should be, or seem to take longer than you expect.
Why should I limit the number of In Progress items?
It has been shown that people work best when they can focus, and focusing on one thing at a time is the most efficient way to work. Prioritise the work that needs to be done rather than just piling the work on and hope it gets done. Multitasking simply does not work.
Why Should I Visualise my Workflow?
The power of visualisation may be apparent immediately, but for some things the real power comes out over time. Standing around the board each morning your team can see each of the work items, and what stage they are at. Once you starting visualising your workflow and your work items you may start to notice some things:
- Competing priorities soon become clear. If you limit the number of workflow items in progress, you will start having real conversations about which are the most important once in your To do list.
- Stages in your workflow that take a long time to complete will soon have workflow items building up.
- You can start having clearer conversations about everyone’s workload.
- You will soon see if there is too much depending on a single person in the team (because their workflow cards will be piling up).
- Tasks that sit on the board for a long term start to stand out. Try and workout why it takes so long – perhaps the team is stuck and not sure of what should be done next, or are relying on someone or another company, maybe they don’t have the knowledge and need some help or training. Use this knowledge to you and yours teams benefit and avoid it happening in the future.
What tools do I need?
If you’re all located in the same office, then just find a wall, get some post-it notes and make some columns.
There are also online tools to use to help out. Now that many people work remotely, you may want to consider one. We use Jira where I work, but there are many other options like Trello, Kanban Tool, Asana, and Kanban Flow.
If you’re using a system you and the team need to mindful that it only works if you keep the cards or tasks up to date, with the most recent information and status. The advantage of using online systems is that everyone can add comments, reference related tasks, assign tasks to a particular person, and even automate some mundane steps.
