- What is kanban? Well, it's many things
a kanban is an object, kanban is a set of principles, Kanban is also an agile framework. And in this video, we're gonna be looking at all three aspects of kanban with the help of a coffee machine, a Doctor Who Lego
character and a coffee cup. Welcome to Development That Pays, the number one agile channel on YouTube. My name is Gary Straughan and if we're meeting for the first time, please consider subscribing
and hit that bell so you don't miss a thing. All right, before we go too much further, let's disambiguate. There's Kanban the Agile
framework an alternative to Scrum. I like to write kanban in that context, with a capital K, an uppercase K, but long before there was
an uppercase K kanban, there were a couple of lower case kanbans. Kanban the thing, the object, the sign and kanban the set of principles. And today we're gonna start by
talking about the latter two. And then later we'll add
the Kanban the framework back in to the brew. Talking of brew, I think I'm
gonna grab myself a coffee. Okay into the shop, I place my order, tap my card, and she gets
on and makes my coffee. (coffee machine whirring) Finally, I collect my coffee. Did you see any kanban here? No, neither did I. For the simple reason that
there really isn't any need for any form of kanban in here. And now it's probably a
good time to introduce a couple of terms that
I'm gonna rely on later. What we have here is a defined process. Take my order, make my coffee
and deliver it back to me. And with just one person
doing all of the steps in that defined process, we
really don't have any need for any special orchestration, other than the fact that those three steps really should be done in just that order. If the coffee shop becomes
a bit of a destination in the neighborhood, and of
course, I wish it every success, then it's gonna feel the need
to scale things up a bit. One option would be to just well, instead of having
one barista in the shop, he could have two. Each doing, well everything and providing they can
maneuver around each other. There's not much we need
to do, to make things work. Still the same defined process and the need for a little
bit of orchestration, but largely it takes care of itself. The till is either available or it isn't and the coffee machine is
either available or it isn't. Actually this fine looking machine looks like it might be capable of preparing more than one
coffee at the same time. So that's one option, two people doing all of the steps inside the defined process. The coffee shop has another
option for scaling things up, and that is to begin to specialize. Instead of adding a second barista, they could choose to add
a dedicated order taker. I struggled to find a good Lego character. This is apparently Doctor Who and yeah, so Doctor Who is gonna
have to do for yeah, for the guy taking the
order in the coffee shop. So yes, Doctor Who taking
orders, barista making the coffee and this arrangement this specialization comes with some notable advantages. We have a dedicated order taker who can presumably become better
at order taking over time. And we have a dedicated barista who is focusing all of his attention on becoming better at making coffee. There are other advantages
to this approach. And if you can think of any,
I'd love to hear from you in those comments below. Well I'm gonna go on now to
talk about the disadvantages of this move to specialization of skills. And again, if you can think
of any of the downsides of working in this way then I
would love to hear from you. I am going to focus on just
one of those downsides, and that is that we now
have added some complexity to our process that
wasn't there previously. And that is our defined
process now requires two people to carry it out fully. For the first time we're having to handle the handoff between the
person taking the order and the person making the coffee. Let's take a look at that in action. Here's the coffee shop,
let's bring in the barista. And let's bring in you know who yeah, yeah, that Doctor Who guy and let's give them
some customers to serve. This person who's just
arrived at the coffee shop and joined the queue, that's
our hero, his name is Robert. And Robert patiently waits in
the queue, ready to be served. Okay, now he's at the front of the queue, he's placing his order,
coffee type, milk type, and all of that information
is recorded on the cup. How interesting. He's also asked for his name and his name is also recorded on the cup. Obviously, if this has been real life, the writing wouldn't be nearly so neat and the spelling would not
have been nearly so accurate. But this will do for
our purposes here today. This is interesting,
Robert's just left one queue and joined another. We'll be talking more about in due course. The barista's now ready
to pick up Robert's cup. He reads the information
from the side of the cup, so that he knows exactly
what coffee to make, gets on and makes the coffee. (coffee machine whirring) And finally, Robert is in
receipt of the perfect brew. And at that point, of course,
he's able to leave the shop and get on with his day,
the process now complete. Hopefully no surprises there, that much is your experience of how things tend to
work in a coffee shop. Now, big question for you. Did you spot the kanban? You're quite right, the kanban
is actually the coffee cup. This coffee cup kanban, helps us with a couple of
complexities that weren't there, when we had one person doing everything in the defined process. Taking the order, making the
coffee, delivering the coffee. Now with two people in the mix, we have the situation where the person, who is making the coffee
didn't take the order therefore doesn't know what was ordered, nor do they know who placed the order. The kanban coffee cup
answers both questions all of the information
needed to make the coffee is on the cup and also
the name of the person who placed the order is also on the cup, two problems solved. But a kanban, coffee
cup shape or otherwise, does not a kanban system
make, as we shall soon see. I'm gonna give our friends here just a little more breathing room. So let's start by looking at things from the point of view of the customer. The best experience for our friend Robert is that the cup barely
touches down on the counter before the barista picks
it up to make his coffee and then barely hits the
desk on the other side before Robert picks it
up and goes off with it. I'm sure you'll agree that
the best experience for Robert is to get his coffee
through the entire system in the shortest possible time. Now let's go look at
that process once again but this time, I want you
to pay a special attention to the progress of the
kanban, the coffee cup kanban through the system and pay
extra special attention to the point where the
kanban comes to a halt. An order comes in, the details are written on the kanban coffee cup and the cup is placed on the
counter to wait its turn. Then another order comes in. Then another order and then another, then another order and then another. All during the time when our
friendly neighborhood barista is busy making one perfect brew. This stash of stationary
cups, stationary kanbans, means there's a corresponding
queue of people, not the first queue of people
waiting to place an order, the second queue of people who have yet to receive the coffee. Certainly not a desirable state of affairs and there are lots of questions I could ask you at this point, but I'm gonna ask just
one, whose fault is this? I suppose we could point the
finger of blame at the barista. Perhaps he should be working faster. But a perfect cup of joe cannot be rushed. I mean, maybe we could
shave 10% of his time, while maintaining optimum coffee quality. But that's gonna be nowhere near enough to clear this backlog. Perhaps then it's the
order taker that's to blame and in fact, our friend Doctor Who here is perfectly positioned
to prevent this pile up. He could indeed realize that
things are starting to unravel and could start to stall, he could start to take orders more slowly. And this is kind of counterintuitive that we should pay a specialist and then asked him to do his
best work by slowing down. This is also a subject that
we will be returning to, in due course. Have you by any chance heard of the fundamental attribution error? It is our human tendency,
not a very good one either. Our tendency when things go wrong, to look for the guilty party
to try to find a scapegoat. And it's an error because in most cases, the overwhelming majority of cases, when things go wrong, it's
not a person that's to blame, it is the system. I mention it now because
I was, just guilty of it, looking for someone to blame, when really, it is the
system that is to blame. What we need to do here is fix the system so that this pile of cups cannot happen. And we can do it very simply, just by applying a hard
limit to the number of cups that are allowed in this
area at any one time. By the way, we've just
implemented a kanban principle, the principle of limiting
work in progress of a system. What we've also seen, we've glimpsed, we've been given a clue
as to the true nature of a kanban, that's kanban the object. Our kanban coffee cup represents a request to do something specific. To prepare a coffee to
Robert's specifications. But it also represents a request
to do something in general, to introduce another
coffee cup into the system. The value of a kanban isn't
just in its existence, it's also in its scarcity. And here we can draw a parallel
between kanban and currency. A dollar bill doesn't
have much intrinsic value. I mean, it's kind of a bit of paper with some clever printing on it. The value of a dollar bill,
or a pound coin or a euro, comes from the fact that
the supply is limited. So it can be said that kanban
isn't really about the cards, the tokens, the coffee cups, in the same way as currency
isn't really about the notes and the coins. At this point, you might be thinking, I could really use a cup of coffee. You might also be thinking that this here, coffee shop example is
all very well and good, but how does it relate to my kanban board? How does it relate to
Kanaban with a capital K, Kanban the Agile framework. We are gonna be getting into that and talking more about those
kanbans with a little K in the very next episode. I look forward to seeing you then.
