Why kanban works




















Kanban suggests the use of feedback loops at a team level as well as service-oriented cadences. Service-oriented cadences in kanban such as operations, service delivery, and risk meetings aim to synchronise and improve the delivery of your services. The output of these reviews, such as understanding what is blocking the most effective service delivery can serve as a decision influencing factor for the continuous improvement of your network of services.

While focused and regular meetings with fewer attendees have proven to be a good practice, the ideal duration of specific kanban cadences depends on your context, the size of your team, and the topics that you cover. The way to achieve continuous improvement and sustainable change inside any organisation is through collaboratively implementing changes based on nothing but scientifically proven methods, feedback, and metrics.

Increased Visibility of the Flow — The basic idea of Kanban is visualising every piece of work. This way, the Kanban board turns into a central informational hub, and everyone is on the same page. All tasks are visible and they never get lost, which brings transparency to the whole work process.

Every team member can have a quick update on the status of every project or task. Improved Delivery Speed — Kanban offers multiple ways for project managers to closely monitor and make informed analyses of the distribution of work. With a clear view over the work items completed for a certain period of time, the stages where tasks spend the longest, bottlenecks are easy to identify. Teams are enabled to tackle these challenges to improve their workflow and, ultimately, their delivery rate.

This alignment between the business direction and execution enhances the agility of an organisation. Analysing the amount of time that tasks spend in your workflow cycle time will enable you to improve your predictions on how much work you can deliver in the future.

Understanding your delivery rate consistency will make your forecasts more accurate, and you can base your decisions on historical data. Improved Ability to Manage Scale and Dependencies — The intrinsic kanban practice to visualisation can also be applied when it comes to mapping and managing dependencies.

Managing dependencies provides both insights on the present state of a workflow and ideas for future improvement opportunities. It also enables full transparency for strategic management over the workflow and the existing links between teams. Reduced Waste Output — The origin of the kanban method implies that work should only be done when there is a demand. In other words, kanban navigates you to reduce waste by working solely on tasks that are needed at present, rather than creating a large stock of goods that may not get bought or used.

Pixar was heavily inspired by the initial kanban system that was implemented by the Toyota Production Team. For Edwin Catmull, the President of Pixar Animation Studios, it was crucial that each film was made in the right order. Really enjoyed the article. I need to socialize this with my counterparts and supervisors to get some buy-in on this process. Sonya Siderova is a passionate product manager and a driving force behind Nave , a Kanban analytics suite that helps teams improve their delivery speed through data-driven decision making.

When she's not catering to her two little ones, you might find Sonya absorbed in a good heavyweight boxing match or behind a screen crafting a new blog post.

Username or Email Address. Remember Me. Process Improvement , Team Performance. Sonya Siderova , 3 years ago 3 6 min read Better visibility Visualization is an important Kanban practice , and the most recognizable feature of the method is the Kanban board.

Improved efficiency Every product manager wishes they could get more done. Increased productivity Improved efficiency naturally leads to the next Kanban benefit, which is increased productivity. Preventing team overburden Traditional management methods rely on planning upfront and pushing the work on to your team. How helpful is this article? Project Management. Related posts. Project Management , Team Performance. Sonya Siderova , 4 years ago 3 min read. Process Improvement , Project Management.

Sonya Siderova , 3 years ago 5 min read. Sonya Siderova , 2 years ago 7 min read. Sonya Siderova , 4 months ago 6 min read. Trevor Leahy Thank you for this.

Brilliant blog. Let us deal with the IT pain so you don't have to. Or use on-premise if you prefer. See how Inflectra tools work with you, whatever your role. Our customers work in every industry imaginable. From financial services to healthcare and biotech to government and defense and more, we work with our customers to address their specific needs. Our products do not enforce a methodology on you, instead they let you work your way. If you want to learn more about application delivery, testing, and more take a look at our whitepapers , videos , background papers , blog , and presentations.

Customers use our tools to help automate repetitive tasks and streamline their business processes using our Robotic Process Automation RPA solutions. We collaborate with a wide range of teams to bring our customers a range of services including load testing , training , and consultation , complimentary technologies , and specialized tools for specific industries. Learn how different organizations have benefited from using Inflectra products to manage their software testing and application develooment.

Outstanding support is the foundation of our company. We make support a priority over all other work. Take a look at our support policy. Discover great tips, discussions, and technical solutions from fellow customers and Inflectra's technical experts. If you can't find the answer you're looking for, please get in touch with us: over email, phone, or online.

Our tools integrate with over 50 different applications to help you work smarter and faster. We offer a wide range of extensions and add-ons to do everything from hooking up to Google Sheets, to your IDE, to unit test frameworks.

We are constantly creating new videos to help customers learn about our products, including through in depth webinars, all freely available along with a wide selection of presentations. We provide a number of resources to help customers learn how to get the most out of our products, with free online resources, virtual classrooms, and face to face. Read about Inflectra , our manifesto, and values.

Meet our incredible customers who are building awesome things. We are focused on their success using our tools. Take a look at our press releases, company news, and product announcements. If you are looking for our logos, check out our Media Kit. The Inflectra Blog contains articles on all aspects of the software lifecycle.

In addition we have whitepapers , background articles , videos and presentations to help get you started. Events are a big part of our awesome customer service. They are a chance to learn more about us, our products, and how to level up your skills with our tools.

Another advantage to using Kanban is the focus on continuous delivery. By delivering small portions of a project continuously to the customer, teams have multiple opportunities to synchronize future iterations with the updated business requirements. In this way, teams can ensure they are delivering exactly what the customer wants.

Other advantages to using Kanban revolve around productivity and efficiency, two concepts that also tie back to the reduction of waste. A well-designed Kanban system helps teams to identify and reduce process waste in all of its forms. You can think of process waste as anything that does not add value to the customer.

It can come in the form of:. Instead, the team member pulls the next Kanban card from the top of the queue without spending any time considering which task to pull next. Instead, individuals operate in functional silos — performing their functions as opposed to collaborating cross-functionally, leading to miscommunications, frustration, and resentment. They can see where work piles up, where it gets stuck, and where the system is overwhelmed.

They are armed with the visibility and insight to begin to practice a pull system — where work items are pulled into the queue by the people doing the work as they complete tasks, in order of priority. Instead of person A pushing work over a wall to person B, person A and person B work together to decide when to start that work.

When the system has capacity for that project to begin, person A performs their part, then when they are ready, person B pulls it onto their plate. Using Kanban to implement a pull system helps to increase accountability, transparency, and collaboration across teams — leading to better collaboration, less waste, and more predictable delivery.

We recommend that all teams implementing a Kanban system practice the exercises in the Kanban Roadmap. These exercises are designed to help teams define their existing processes and map them on a Kanban board.

From there, teams can identify and implement opportunities for improvement. Looking at Kanban examples from teams similar to yours can serve as helpful inspiration as well.

The most important thing to remember is that your Kanban system should be an accurate reflection of your true process, because you must understand where you are to see how to get where you want. Rachaelle Lynn, a Certified SAFe Agilist, is a marketing manager and subject matter expert at Planview, a market-leading provider of project portfolio management, lean and agile delivery, project management, and innovation management software.



0コメント

  • 1000 / 1000