Kanban Basics
"signboard" or "visual signal" in Japanese
What is the word "kanban"?
"Work in Progress"
What does WIP stand for?
the key to effective collaboration and to identify improvement opportunities, we want to reveal hidden work from within the organization
What is "Visualize?"
A chart showing the aggregate of arrivals and departures of work items from each step in the workflow over a time period
What is a Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD)?
The performance of a series of activities, also known as a workflow, to fulfill customer requests
What is "Service Delivery?"
"To Do," "In Progress," and "Done"
What are the three popular categories of a kanban board?
to prevent overloading the team and improve focus
Why are WIP limits important?
complete work as smoothly and predictably as possible, while maintaining a sustainable pace
What is "Manage Flow?"
a measurement of the time spent working on a task, not including wait times
What is "Cycle Time?"
This Kanban principle emphasizes understanding what customers want and ensuring their expectations are met.
What is "Understand and focus on customer needs and expectations"?
to optimize workflow by visualizing work, limiting work in progress (WIP), and ensuring a smooth flow of tasks from start to finish
What is the primary goal of kanban?
work slows down, bottlenecks form, and flow efficiency decrease
What happens when you exceed WIP limits?
agreed to jointly between all parties involved including customers, stakeholders, and employees responsible for work on the board
What is "make policies explicit?"
This Kanban metric measures the percentage of time work items spend actively being worked on, versus the total elapsed time from start to finish
What is Flow Efficiency?
Rather than micromanaging individuals, Kanban encourages teams to do this around their tasks.
What is "Let people self-organize around work"?
Start with what you do now and agree to evolutionary change.
What is the first step in starting with kanban?
One strategy for setting effective WIP limits
What is start low and adjust based on team capacity and feedback
regularly collect, analyze, and act upon feedback from various sources like customers, stakeholders, or team members to identify and address areas for improvement
What is Implement Feedback Loops?
a visual representation that shows the frequency distribution of how long it takes for a work item to move through a Kanban system
What is the "Lead Time Histogram?"
Kanban promotes this type of approach to work, treating organizations as evolving systems of service delivery.
What is "A service-oriented approach"?
"David J. Anderson"
Who developed the kanban method in the context of software development? or Who wrote the "Kanban Blue Book?"
A system for delivering work only when both demand exists and delivery capacity is available - signals to indicate available capacity
What is a "Pull System?"
We design safe-to-fail experiments so that if our hypothesis is correct and the experiment gives good results
What is Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally
This metric, essential for predictability in Kanban, uses historical data to forecast when future work items are likely to be completed, typically shown through probabilistic measures
What is Cycle Time Distribution (or Lead Time Distribution)?
To improve service delivery, organizations should regularly review this interconnected system of workflows.
What is "The network of services"?