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Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the team members. In this approach, the process, from definition of a task to its delivery to the customer, is displayed for participants to see and team members pull work from a queue.

Kanban in the context of software development can mean a visual process management system that tells what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce inspired by the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing.

The Kanban Method

The name 'Kanban' originates from Japanese, and translates roughly as "signboard" or "billboard". It was formulated by David J. Anderson is an approach to incremental, evolutionary process and systems change for organizations. It uses a work-in-progress limited pull system as the core mechanism to expose system operation (or process) problems and stimulate collaboration to continuously improve the system. It is rooted in four basic principles:

Start with what you do now

The Kanban method does not prescribe a specific set of roles or process steps. The Kanban method starts with the roles and processes you have and stimulates continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes to your system. The Kanban method is a change management method.

Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change

The organization (or team) must agree that continuous, incremental and evolutionary change is the way to make system improvements and make them stick. Sweeping changes may seem more effective but have a higher failure rate due to resistance and fear in the organization. The Kanban method encourages continuous small incremental and evolutionary changes to your current system.

Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities and titles

It is likely that the organization currently has some elements that work acceptably and are worth preserving. The Kanban method seeks to drive out fear in order to facilitate future change. It attempts to eliminate initial fears by agreeing to respect current roles, responsibilities and job titles with the goal of gaining broader support.

Leadership at all levels

Acts of leadership at all levels in the organization, from individual contributors to senior management, are encouraged.

Kanban Method's six core practices

Anderson identified five core properties that had been observed in each successful implementation of the Kanban method. They were later relabeled as practices and extended with the addition of a sixth.

1. Visualize

   Visualising workflows supports proper understanding of changes planned and helps to implement them according to this plan.

   A common way to visualise the workflow is to use a card wall with cards and columns. The columns on the card wall represent different states or steps in the workflow.

2. Limit WIP

   Limiting work-in-process implies that a pull system is implemented on parts or all of the workflow. The pull system acts as one of the main stimuli for continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes to the system.

   The pull system can be implemented as a kanban system, a CONWIP system, a DBR system, or some other variant. The critical elements are that work-in-process at each state in the workflow is limited and that new work is “pulled” into the new information discovery activity when there is available capacity within the local WIP limit.

3. Manage flow

   Each transition between states in the workflow is monitored, measured and reported. By actively managing the flow the continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes to the system can be evaluated to have positive or negative effects on the system.

4. Make policies explicit

   Until the mechanism of a process is made explicit, it is often hard or impossible to hold a discussion about improving it. Without an explicit understanding of how things work and how work is actually done, any discussion of problems tends to be emotional, anecdotal and subjective. With an explicit understanding it is possible to move to a more rational, empirical, objective discussion of issues.

5. Implement feedback loops

   Organizations that have not implemented the second level of feedback - the operations review - generally do not see process improvements beyond a localized team level.

6. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally (using models and the scientific method)

   The Kanban method encourages small continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes that stick. When teams have a shared understanding of theories about work, workflow, process and risk, they are more likely to be able to build a shared comprehension of a problem and suggest improvements which can be agreed to by consensus.

   The Kanban method suggests using a scientific approach to implement continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes.

Common models used are:

• Theory of constraints (the study of bottlenecks)
• Deming System of Profound Knowledge (a study of variation and how it affects processes)
• Lean economic model (based on the concept of elimination of "waste" (or muda, muri and mura)).

Open Kanban

Open Kanban is an open source, Agile and Lean based method to deliver value for knowledge-intensive work, e.g. in the fields of information technology, software development, business, product development and personal organization. On the Lean side it is inspired on the work of Taiichi Ohno (Toyota Production System), Eliyahu Goldratt (Theory of Constraints) and W. Edwards Deming. On the Agile side it takes inspiration from the Agile manifesto signers, and in addition contributions from Alan Shalloway’s Kanban for Teams, Corey Ladas Scrumban and David Anderson's early Kanban work.

It innovates by making the whole method fully open source and free to improve or modify. Open Kanban was written by Joseph Hurtado, and it has been translated by members of the community to French, Italian, Russian and Ukrainian.

Kanban Board Example

Kanban Software Development Workflow complements the Scrum, XP and Waterfall models.

See also

• Kanban
• Kanban board
• Teamwork
• Lean software development
• List of software development philosophies

References

1. Toyota Production System Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production
2. The Machine That Changed the World
3. Anderson, David (September 2003). Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-142460-2.
4. ^ Anderson, David (April 2010). Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business. Blue Hole Press. ISBN 0-9845214-0-2.
5. Jasper Boeg (2012-02). "Priming Kanban". Denmark: InfoQ. Retrieved 2014-02-17. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

• Agile software development
• Japanese business terms
• Software development philosophies