• Kanban in Japanese mean sign-board

• Kanban has its origins in lean product development, an approach to product development inspired by lean manufacturing principles and practices at Toyota.

• Kanban board in instrumental in Kanban

Lean Principles

Lean product development focuses on 7 fundamental principles:

• Eliminate Waste - Anything that:

  • Does not add value to the customer

  • Doesn't add quality

  • increases time or effort to produce product.

• Build in Quality - Lean focuses on good practices to ensure integrity and prevent defects.

  • Traditional product development focuses on finding defects. Lean focuses on good practices to ensure integrity and prevent defects.

• Create Knowledge - Lean encourages both training and peer-to-peer knowledge transfer.

  • In Lean, iterative demo to the business users allows the team to live through the concept of "do a little, show a little, learn a little".

  • Collaboration enhances sharing of explicit and tacit knowledge.

• Defer Commitment - Lean recommends the Agile Team wait until the "last responsible moment"(is that point where if the Agile team does not make a decision, you will either significantly impact the work or a decision will be made by others for them**.**) to make a decision, which allows for additional time to innovate.

• Deliver Fast - Lean encourages the Agile Team to create and deliver the product incrementally.

  • the team builds only what is truly needed and avoids unnecessary features.

  • Lean recommends to release product earlier to get feedback from the customer sooner.

• Respect People - The Team must feel trusted and valuable to think and solve problems for themselves.

  • Authority to effect outcomes

• Optimize the Whole - Lean encourages decreasing barriers to increase efficiencies by decreasing the amount of hand-offs and reducing WIP.

Lean Principles set the foundation for Kanban.

Five Principles of Kanban

Kanban is a lightweight Agile Framework with 5 principles:

• Visualize the Flow - The Team visualizes the workflow, which helps in

  • organizing

  • tracking

  • optimizing the work.

• Limit Work in Progress- Kanban respects Team's ideal working capacity. Limiting WIP helps to

  • smooth the flow of work

  • reduce lead times

  • improve quality

  • delivery more frequently.

• Manage Flow - By Monitoring and measuring the flow of work, issues are identified as soon as possible, which

  • improves delivery predictability.

  • minimize lead time

• Make Policies Explicit - Establishing policies provides the Agile Team with explicit understanding of the processes for discussions around issues objectively rather than emotionally.

• Improve Collaboratively - The Agile Team must own the team’s work related processes and work collaboratively to improve the processes being utilized.

Kanban Ceremonies

• Focused meeting with specific purpose

• You will recall the 6 Scrum Ceremonies. In Kanban:

  • The Ceremonies are simplified.

  • There is no Sprint Planning Ceremony.

  • And there is no Sprint Retrospective.

  • Sprint Review/Demo is just called Review Demo.

So, the 4 Kanban ceremonies align with 4 of the Scrum ceremonies.

Kanban provides the ability to view in one instance, the status of the entire product development journey.

Review/Demo ==

Where Does Kanban Make Sense?

• Since it focuses on the Agile Team’s workflow and throughput, Kanban is seen as a better Agile Framework option solution for projects where the work is likely to involve a large quantity of relatively small activities.

• Kanban is also suitable for work that may arise on an ad-hoc basis.

Core Roles in Kanban

• Product Owner - Seen as the voice of the customer.

• Facilitator - Team's Servant Leader.

• Agile Team - These are the resources that collaborate and work on the product deliverables.

Kanban Artifacts

Kanban Board

• A Kanban Board plays a valuable role as an information radiator

• since it shows the work items in their various stages of the product development journey.

• The Kanban board makes it very easy to visualize what has been completed, what is currently in progress, and what work items have not commenced yet.

Cumulative Flow Diagram

• Problem areas are easily detected

• Changes can be made so that work can continue efficiently

• A Cumulative Flow Diagram shows the total amount of WIP and how quickly projects are being completed.

Advantage

• It reduces the potential need to rework a large collection of flawed, partially completed items

• It helps optimize throughput to make processes work more efficiently.

• It brings bottlenecks in the production process to the surface so they can be identified and resolved.

Disadvantage

• It maximizes resource utilization to make processes work more efficiently.