Kanban your work
The Kanban method is in the Agile suite of tools that can help you visualise and prioritise work.
Simplifying work is a common theme of 10x Curiosity. The Kanban method is in the Agile suite of tools that can help you visualise and prioritise work.
The Kanban Method represents a Complex Adaptive Systems approach to leading change in organizations. Complex Adaptive Systems use simple rules and seed conditions to stimulate emergent behavior. The simple rules are embedded in the 5 Core Properties and the seed conditions are represented in the first principles of starting with the current process, gaining agreement to pursue incremental improvement and respecting current work practices, roles, responsibilities and job titles. What will happen next is emergent change. Beyond that we cannot predict.
Agile techniques provide an alternate to the historical top down management structure that has come to define the industrial age. In an agile work environment,
Work is done by self-organizing teams that could mobilize the full talents of those doing the work.
Work is focused directly on meeting customers’ needs.
Work proceeds in an iterative fashion so that it can progressively satisfy customers’ needs better.
Kanban is based on 5 core principles:
- Visualize the workflow
- Limit WIP
- Manage Flow
- Make Process Policies Explicit
- Improve Collaboratively (using models & the scientific method)
The kanban board is one of the main artifacts that help pull this system together. There are many variations of a kanban board. At its simplest it has three columns: TO DO; DOING; DONE.
Limiting Work in Process (WIP) is a key concept to leveraging the power of kanban:
Reducing work-in-progress, or shortening the length of an iteration, will have a significant impact on initial quality. It appears that the relationship between quantity of work-in-progress and initial quality is non-linear; that is, defects will rise disproportionately to increases in quantity of WIP. Therefore, it makes sense that two-week iterations are better than four-week iterations and that one-week iterations are better still. Shorter iterations will drive higher quality.
Following the logic of the evidence presented, it makes even more sense simply to limit WIP using a kanban system. If we know that managing WIP will improve quality, why not introduce explicit policy to limit WIP, thus freeing managers to focus on other activities? (Kanban- Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business — David Anderson)
An interesting side effect of reducing WIP is that you will start to really see what the bottleneck in the process is, and as per the theory of constraints this is a desirable state to reveal. Other parts of the system will not be fully utilised and slack will begin to appear. David Anderson again:
You need slack to enable continuous improvement. You need to balance demand against throughput and limit the quantity of work-in-progress to enable slack.
Intuitively, people believe they have to eliminate slack. So after limiting work-in-progress by balancing demand against throughput, the tendency is to “balance the line” by adjusting resources so that everyone is efficiently fully utilized. Although this may look efficient and satisfy typical twentieth-century management accounting practices, it will impede the creation of an improvement culture. You need slack to enable continuous improvement. In order to have slack, you must have an unbalanced value stream with a bottleneck resource. Optimizing for utilization is not desirable.
John McConnell looks at WIP from the point of view of a production system:
Problems tend to occur when managers and schedulers expect manufacturing and supply chain operations to behave in ways not permitted by natural laws. For example, if we schedule for close to maximum capacity/utilization we ought to expect that cycle time and WIP will grow significantly and plan accordingly.
TQM, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Kanban and Lean Manufacturing have all provided useful tools for improving business performance. However, the utility of these tools is severely limited in the hands of managers and schedulers who do not understand the implications of Little’s Law and the Utilisation Law. In particular, it is common to find people skilled in the use of some of these tools, but who continue to try to defy these laws, at a significant cost. There is no substitute for knowledge.
Visualising work can be set up to deliver what ever values you require. Remote teams can utilise software such as the free Trello or more complicated visual setups:
Games are also a good method of teaching yourself and teams the principles of Kanban.
Personally I find applying kanban principles very useful in my working life. There is something very satisfying about seeing all your work commitments laid out visually and the physical act of moving a sticky note from “Doing” to “Done” on the board.
The Principles of the Kanban Method are designed to lay the foundation for an organization that can improve incrementally by setting out the conditions that will stimulate improvement. The improvements are emergent behavior. The outcome cannot be predicted. All that can reasonably be predicted is that things will change.
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More like this….
- Kanban your work — The Kanban method is in the Agile suite of tools that can help you visualise and prioritise work.
- Swarm Intelligence — Can managers develop simple rules to shape the behaviour of their organizations and replace rigid command-and-control structures?
- Complex Adaptive Systems — Simple Rules, Unpredictable Outcomes — The concept of managing through a series of simple rules is an intriguing one. Could magic in our organisations occur through less rather than more control?
- Questions to get you unstuck… — A good question can be just the trick you need to remove the block and get things flowing again.
