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We’re looking at the Agile and Lean frameworks from the Agile Practice Guide, by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

The reason we’re looking at these is because there are many different methods that you’ll come across in your organization on your Agile journey, and there are many core methods that you’ll come across and also many auxiliary methods that you’ll come across as well. It’s important to know what they are, and a little bit behind them so you can match them up to the core methods and see whether a team is truly Agile or not. This one in particular is Kanban.

The Core Agile Framework of Kanban

Kanban translates to “visual sign” or “card” in Japanese. It has come from the Toyota Production System so it’s got decades and decades of proof behind it in a production environment, and now it’s found its way into technology and project management and even enterprise management as well.

It’s a form of visual management, and it comes from Lean manufacturing for monitoring the Work In Progress. It enables “Pull” and “Flow”, which are two key Lean concepts. The Lean concept of Pull means that we pull the work when we’re ready, so we never have too much work on our plate – we’re never overburdened.  It was traditionally used for inventory, so we would never have too much inventory (which is basically money just sitting there in a manufacturing plant, in a business sense) but it’s the same for technology.

Using Kanban, we don’t have too much stuff just sitting there not really being worked on, we actually pull it when we’re ready, and that enables flow. So now the work is flowing at a better rate and it’s continuously flowing because we’re pulling that work when we’re ready as a team. So a Kanban board really helps this from a manufacturing or lean manufacturing perspective, and now from an Agile perspective, because you can see all of that work and it’s very visual – it’s a method of visual management.  You can see where something is up to and whether something is blocked, whether something needs help or not.

Lean Management Concept of “Pull”
Pull is where your teams pull work only when they are ready, instead of work or inventory building up as we were saying.

Lean Management Concept of “Flow”
Flow is where work flows effortlessly through the value chain with no rework, no blockages for things getting stuck instead of flowing through nicely as we want them to.

Kanban doesn’t prescribe iterations so it’s not really an iterative approach like most of the other approaches in Agile, but it still works very well with iterative approaches (for example Scrum). If you don’t need to use iterations in your work you still can use a Kanban board just to make sure that you’re seeing where the work is, and making sure that it’s flowing through that pipeline nice and neatly.  It’s also helpful when you need increased efficiency. You get visibility of each task which is really great, ensuring that a task adds value, everyone can see it and everyone’s on the same page.

Team members can focus on what work is happening, so that limits Work in Progress, and it’s on that board at all times. It allows the team to focus on the current work and not on something that might be in the back of their mind or might be coming up in a month’s time for example.

It helps you with some variability in the workload because you can see what’s there and you can limit what’s on the board to be worked on at any one time.  And it helps with reduction of “wasteful work”, because the work is so transparent.  In making it visible we can remove any waste, we can see where things are blocked, we can see where things are being reworked and we can see where things are not moving forward.  We can work on those and swarm around them and solve those immediately.

Now additionally with a Kanban board it’s a really cool thing, especially for a physical board out there on the floor somewhere, it acts as an information radiator to anyone who sees it.  It provides that up-to-date information on the status of work for a particular team, or even a particular group or organizational structure as well, but it means that anyone can walk past or access a virtual board (for example if you’re using Trello or JIRA), but anyone can access that and say “Oh look we’ve got 20 pieces of work in the form of our stories or cards, and look are they’re all at the beginning, none of them have been moving forward.” If they come by next week and none of them have moved again, then maybe we want to check in with that team and make sure that everything is OK.

If work is not flowing through a Kanban board or flowing through a team well enough or nicely enough, usually it’s a good time to do a retrospective. That’s where we ask:

• What’s going well
• What’s not going well
• What have we learned recently and
• What still puzzles us

We put that feedback into the process and improve our own process as we go along if needed, to help remove some of those blockers in performing that work.

The defining principles of Kanban

We start with the current state, we agree to pursue incremental and evolutionary change, we respect the current process and we lead at all levels. The core properties of Kanban are:

• We visualize the workflow
• We limit the work in progress

So we’re not over burdening our staff and we can see at a glance the work that’s in progress at the moment. We manage that flow and we enable Pull because we allow our team to pull work when they’re ready.  It helps improve collaboration, and we’re improving collaboratively. So everyone’s getting on board with the improvements and we are implementing feedback loops so we can clearly see what’s going on – we’ve got a quick feedback loop on whether things are going well or things are not going well.

And that’s the core Agile approach of Kanban.

– David McLachlan

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