What is Kanban?
Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. Kanban visualizes both the process (the workflow) and the actual work passing through that process. The goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them so work can flow through it cost-effectively at optimal speed or throughput.
TRIVIA — Kanban, also spelt “kamban” in Japanese, translates to “Billboard” (“signboard” in Chinese) that indicates “available capacity (to work)”. Kanban is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production, where it is used as a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.
A Kanban system ideally controls the entire value chain from the supplier to the end consumer. In this way, it helps avoid supply disruption and overstocking of goods at various stages of the manufacturing process. Kanban requires continuous monitoring of the process. Particular attention needs to be given to avoid bottlenecks that could slow down the production process. The aim is to achieve higher throughput with lower delivery lead times. Over time, Kanban has become an efficient way in a variety of production systems.
Kanban Principles & Practices
The Kanban Method follows a set of principles and practices for managing and improving the flow of work. It is an evolutionary, non-disruptive method that promotes gradual improvements to an organization’s processes. If you follow these principles and practices, you will successfully be able to use Kanban for maximizing the benefits to your business process – improve flow, reduce cycle time, increase value to the customer, with greater predictability – all of which are crucial to any business today.
The four foundational principles and six Core Practices of the Kanban Methodology are provided below:
Start with what you are doing now:
The Kanban Method (hereafter referred to as just Kanban) strongly emphasizes not making any change to your existing setup/ process right away. Kanban must be applied directly to the current workflow. Any changes needed can occur gradually over a period of time at a pace the team is comfortable with.
Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change:
Kanban encourages you to make small incremental changes rather than making radical changes that might lead to resistance within the team and organization.
Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities and job titles:
Unlike other methods, Kanban does not impose any organizational changes by itself. So, it is not necessary to make changes to your existing roles and functions which may be performing well. The team will collaboratively identify and implement any changes needed. These three principles help the organizations overcome the typical emotional resistance and the fear of change that usually accompany any change initiatives in an organization.
Encourage acts of leadership at all levels:
Kanban encourages continuous improvement at all the levels of the organization and it says that leadership acts don’t have to originate from senior managers only. People at all levels can provide ideas and show leadership to implement changes to continually improve the way they deliver their products and services.
How does Kanban work? – The Concept
Kanban is a non-disruptive evolutionary change management system. This means that the existing process is improved in small steps. By implementing many minor changes (rather than a large one), the risk to the overall system is reduced. The evolutionary approach of Kanban leads to low or no resistance in the team and the stakeholders involved.
The first step in the introduction of Kanban is to visualize the workflow. This is done in the form of a Kanban board consisting of a simple whiteboard and sticky notes or cards. Each card on the board represents a task.
In a classic Kanban board model, there are three columns, as shown in the picture above:
- “To Do”: This column lists the tasks that are not yet started. (aka “backlog”)
- “Doing”: Consists of the tasks that are in progress.
- “Done”: Consists of the tasks that are completed.
This simple visualization alone leads to a great deal of transparency about the distribution of the work as well as existing bottlenecks if any. Of course, Kanban boards can show elaborate workflows depending on the complexity of the workflow and the need to visualize and examine specific parts of the workflow to identify bottlenecks in order to remove them.
Kanban is also being applied in traditional project management contexts such as construction and engineering projects. such as constructions and engineering projects. A wide variety of organizations, staffing companies, recruitment organizations, advertising agencies, insurance companies and many others are looking to Kanban for streamlining their operations, eliminating waste and dramatically improving throughput and quality.
Source: Digite
