Kanban Guide: Manage Your Projects Better Today with this Methodology

Kanban was popularized by Toyota as a way to improve their design, engineering, and production processes. The Kanban concept was first developed by a Toyota engineer named Taiichi Ohno in the 1940s, and applied at the main Toyota manufacturing facility in 1953. 

He noticed how the local grocery stores use a “pull” method. As customers bought the stocks off the shelf, the store would “pull” more stock from the warehouse based on the demand forecasts. This approach seemed ideal for their manufacturing process as well. Kanban in Japanese roughly means “signboard”, “card” or “visual sign”.

Agile is a project management approach that advocates a small team collaboration, scope flexibility, continuous improvement, and close working with customers. Kanban and Agile are both subsets of Lean thinking (although a hot topic of debate for project management professionals is whether Kanban is part of Agile methods), and share lean concepts such as the focus on value, waste elimination, and small batch sizes. 

While there are various flavors of Agile such as Scrum, Crystal, Scrumban, XP, FDD, and others, Kanban is a standalone approach without any sub-flavors. Kanban predominantly uses a visual approach to project management, making it intuitive and easy for people to follow.  

Although it was used in manufacturing in 1940, Kanban became an alternative to Agile methods in the mid-2000. An Agile approach such as Scrum has a bunch of ceremonies, practices, roles, and artifacts. But Kanban does not. Its strength is in its simplicity.

Kanban uses existing roles and team structure. It simply allows you to list tasks on a Kanban board according to the stage of the production process (or workflow stages) that they are in. These could be To-Do, In Progress, and Done, or any other you’d like to have. 

The Kanban process helps you manage load on members at each stage of the workflow, thereby avoiding bottlenecks in the process. This approach allows for the delivery of better value by the project. 

Scrum, another popular Agile approach, uses Sprints. Sprints are typically of 3-4 weeks duration, and act as mini-projects. Sprint planning is done at the beginning by fixing the scope of work, followed by design, development, testing, and deployment. This approach is called time-boxing. 

Kanban does not take the time-box approach. While each task may have a duration, Kanban is viewed more like a continuous flow based process. 

As with any project management approach, you need a set of principles to base your practice on. Here are 4 defining principles of Kanban:

• Start with current state: Kanban is the least disruptive of any project management approach. It allows you to simply start with what you have. Kanban sits on top of whatever team structure, roles, or processes you already use.
• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change: Big changes are difficult to manage and affect and usually include uncertainty. There is less visibility into costs, how exactly work is accomplished, and optimization. Delivering in small, manageable increments is common for both Agile and Kanban methods.
• Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities, and titles: This principle is the one that makes Kanban the least disruptive and highly flexible to be implemented in any project, using any project management method.
  • You implement the visual flow of workflow on top of existing practices, respecting current roles and responsibilities, and suddenly you have,
    • Better visibility
    • More control
    • Fewer bottlenecks
    • Higher certainty of outcome
• Encourage acts of leadership at all levels in your organization: Kanban does not restrict people from teaming up and working together on a task, nor does it introduce hierarchy. Any member is allowed to take a leadership role and additional responsibility. This openness helps team members to take up growth opportunities voluntarily.

Some practitioners call these properties, and some call them practices. 

Visualize the Workflow

Visualization is the main aspect of a Kanban approach. The Kanban board shows various stages of the process and how many (and which) tasks are at each of these stages. You can immediately see how useful this would be to avoid bottlenecks in the process, in work allocation, and for the throughput.

Limit Work-In-Progress (WIP)

Once you have visibility of the entire process, you can know how many (and which) tasks are currently being worked upon. With that, you can see which developer is associated with which task. These allow you to ensure you limit the tasks in progress at any point, and thus manage delivery timeline and quality expectations.

Manage Flow

The flow here refers to the movement of tasks across various stages of the process (or workflow). The one who takes the responsibility of managing flow will have to ensure that too many tasks do not get accumulated in a stage, people are assigned to the tasks being worked upon, people are not overallocated, and tasks are moved all the way through the final stages. 

This management will ensure better throughput in the system. Metrics such as lead time (time taken from adding a task to the board till its completion) and cycle time (time taken from when a task is taken up for implementation till its completion) of each task will help manage flow efficiently.

Make Process Policies Explicit

Although the system is simple, misunderstanding policies and rules can derail the process. Hence, the team should be clear about the policies, roles, and ground rules.

Implement Feedback Loops

A process or performance cannot be improved unless feedback is sought and acted upon. Agile uses an inspect & adapt approach at each stage of development. Similarly, in Kanban, the relevant responsible member must ensure that the feedback loops are implemented.

Improve Collaboratively 

As there is clarity of the role and allocation of work, team members can collaboratively work together to create the output in the most optimal way. This results in,

• Lesser risks
• Improved quality
• Increased throughput
• Improved employee morale

As you can imagine, a Kanban board is a visual board that is used to manage workflow. It can be a physical board kept in the team’s area, or a digital board that each member can access on their computer.

The board contains columns representing various stages that a task flows through. The tasks (represented by cards) are moved through these columns as they pass through those stages. Instead of changing the status of a task, you move the tasks under each status. 

This makes it easy to see how many tasks are under each workflow stage. This is similar to the board that a Scrum team maintains and refers to during their daily Scrum meetings.

The Kanban board is flexible and can be adapted for any kind of process with multiple stages. It is quite easy to use as the board itself is self-explanatory. And provides instant clarity about the health of the project. Since all members work off the same Kanban board, this increases collaboration. 

With such control over the flow, the wastage of time and resources can be reduced efficiently. Now, if you’ve been considering using Kanban for a customer support ticket management system, you’d be absolutely right in this decision.

Kanban is best for projects where the focus is more on individual deliverables than timelines. It is good where the work comes in at an unexpected rate, and has to be taken up based on a combination of time of arrival and priority. Projects with many interdependencies between tasks may not be a good fit for using Kanban.

Few examples of Kanban projects are:

• A marketing plan with multiple channel-based campaigns – can use a Kanban board for each channel and maintain control and visibility
• An author can create a book writing project based on the Kanban approach
• A customer support service can manage the workflow through the Kanban approach

So far, we’ve seen the benefits of Kanban. Let us understand some of the points you need to consider to make sure you get most of your Kanban project:

• Don’t overcomplicate the board: If the team adds too many tasks to the board, then it might get difficult to manage.
• Update board daily: The board can help only if it is updated to represent the daily status of the project. Otherwise, it may give the key stakeholders a wrong understanding of the project’s status.
• Avoid maintaining one board for multiple projects: These projects may be related (like multi-channels of an ad campaign), but using a single board for all of them may overly complicate it. When this happens, you lose some of the benefits of Kanban.
• Use for the right type of project:  Kanban does not work for projects that are time-bound, overly complex, or have interdependency among tasks. For those, the project manager is better off choosing other project management methods.