Kanban

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Kanban

• Signboard

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Definition

• Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work
  with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while
  not overloading the team members
• Kanban 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.

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Four Principles

• Start with what you do now
• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
• Respect the current process, roles,
  responsibilities and titles
• Leadership at all levels

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Kanban Method's core practices

• 1. Visualize
• Visualizing workflows supports proper
  understanding of changes planned and helps to
  implement them according to this plan. A common
  way to visualize 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.

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The Story Card

• What should be on the story card?

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Kanban Pull System

• Kanban is considered a pull system. In a pull
  system, work items are pulled into the queue by
  the people doing the work as they complete tasks
  in order of priority. Kanban enables the delivery
  of work as it becomes available and as part of a
  Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that is sometimes
  defined in the business requirements. Another
  term for Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is Minimum
  Marketable Features (MMF), a term used to
  describe the work that can be delivered which
  meets the business requirements without exceeding
  them. This way, the amount of wasted work is
  minimized while delivering the product as
  specified in the customers business requirements.

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Simulation Time

• Make teams of 1 PO, 1 Analyst, 2 Dev and 2 QA
  team members. The teams can select a new product
  or existing software maintenance to work on.
• Each team should create a visual board, they can
  use the previous slide as example.
• Learnings
• Discuss the learnings of the team.
• What benefit did the team see in creating Visual
  board?

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Kanban Method's core practices

• 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. 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.

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Five Focusing Steps

• The Five Focusing Steps is a simple formula for a
  process of ongoing improvement.
• It states
• Identify the constraint
• Decide how to exploit the constraint
• Subordinate everything else in the system to the
  decision made in 2
• Elevate the constraint
• Avoid inertia, identify the next constraint and
  return to step 2

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Simulation Time

• Ask the team members to limit WIP at each column
  of the visual board.
• Learnings
• Discuss what did the team learn by adding WIP
• What was importance of WIP and what difference
  did it make?
• Did they find bottlenecks and what were those?

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Kanban Method's core practices

• 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.

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Simulation Time

• Ask the team to find solutions to the bottlenecks
  they had identified and implement them.
• Learnings
• How did the teams remove bottlenecks?
• Did getting rid of bottlenecks improve the
  process?

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Kanban Method's core practices

• 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.

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Simulation Time

• Ask the team members to make explicit policies
  and agree to follow them.
• Learnings
• What were the explicit policies made?
• Did explicit policy help them in the work?

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Kanban Method's core practices

• 5. Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)
• 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.
  Teams measure their effectiveness by tracking
  flow, quality, throughput, lead times and more.
  Experiments and analysis can change the system to
  improve the teams effectiveness.

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Simulation Time

• Ask the team members to discuss the process they
  have been following and come up with improvements
  which they think is needed for the process.
• Learnings
• Discuss the improvements each team came up with

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Eliminating Waste

• Everything not adding value to the customer is
  considered to be waste (Muda).
• Examples
• Unnecessary code and functionality
• Delay in software development process
• Unclear requirements
• Bureaucracy
• Slow internal communication

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Scrum or Kanban ?????
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Scrum Vs. Kanban

• Scrum

• Kanban

• User Stories
• Acceptance Tests
• Iterative Development
• Burn Down Charts
• Story Boards
• Daily Stand-ups
• TDD/Unit Tests
• Continuous Integration

• User Stories
• Acceptance Tests
• Iterative Development
• Burn Down Charts
• Kanban Boards
• Daily Stand-ups
• TDD/Unit tests
• Continuous Integration