What is Kanban? | Kanban Practices and Principles

most people think about Coman as the cute board and Post-it moving from left to right and maybe if you're a little bit more savy you know a thing or two about whip limits So today we're going to talk about combine but in a way that I find a lot more effective that's how I coach teams and how I coach people to use comine and we're going to start with combine principles and Coman practices because that really lays the foundation on how to use a comine system in the right way and by the way I do have a blog post exactly on that matter and if you go to that blog post what you can also find there it's a PDF with five ideas for you to use to improve your kban system depending on what your needs are and where it hurts so kban you probably heard it was invented in the 40s by taono all that good stuff but back then it was really on the manufacturing model and the Seven Ways and it's important to notice that kamban today is not exactly that waste is always was a big problem in any industry anytime you talk about delivery so obviously that stays um very much in the essence of Kaman and I actually have a blog post on that it's called muda murri like I'll put a link in the description down below as well so you can check it out but Kaman today is a brilliant adaptation uh by David J Anderson and he's a Management Consultant and he really is a pioneer of what we call today the comand method and a number of related Frameworks he talked about Upstream Coman so a lot of what you know today is really thanks to him especially if we talking managing work in the context of technology fintech and similar Industries now my definition of combine what is combine especially today combine is a methodology for managing work in a way that protects the flow of value it basically means people proactively and collaboratively pay attention to the work during each of the work stages from inception to delivery and letting nothing get in the way of successful completion of that piece of work impediments are dealt with as they arise and nobody keeps switching context you heard me talk many times that multitasking doesn't exist there's only contact switching just like with agile we talk about principles well also has principles and there's only four and they are to be followed if you want to be using kamban for the betterment of your work management and the first one the first principle is so essential that it stood the test of time and remain the same as in the original one Bono and the first one it start with what you do now the beauty of combine is how it was thought and designed to work with existing Pro processes and ways of working instead of replacing everything what I really appreciate about this principle is how it acknowledges that there are things that work today and we should keep using and refining the things that do work another thing that makes this principle really good in easy to start with cban is because it becomes very fine to justify using cban since nobody will fear too much change or too much cost you see these agile Transformations out there disrupting everything you do currently in the name of brand new ways of working well and you see how well or not it's working for most of these organizations it's costly it's disrupting it is the opposite of what the next principle of kamban says and that is to agree to pursue incremental evolutionary change so it's kind of a corollary kamban acknowledges the challenges of implementing substantial change any meaningful change can be complicated and whenever it's big you know it's going to be disruptive and we know that change at any level will face resistance from people at all levels in the organization from Senior Management they usually are worried about you know escalating expenses where when you talk about the project teams they are a little bit worried about the changes in their work routine and how that can affect quality and how they do things so if you agree to go slowly you have more chance to control the change and that actually leads to the next principle which is respect the current process roles and responsibilities once again one of my favorite here I love it because of two things the first is that you worked with the existing processes that evolved within the organization you honor their past which usually makes people very happy but second you end up with a system or a framework that is completely perfectly tailored to the organization or the department that you're helping and um and it's simpler it's much simpler to evolve something to the specific needs of someone than actually trying to be very generic and Broad so Kaman has a a leg up in that sense and that can only happen because of the fourth principle which is we encourage acts of leadership at all levels in the organization so it's more than just celebrating collaboration it's championing the idea that leadership can emerge from any level within the organization and that's not to say that everybody has a say on the whole life of the organization but it means hey I acknowledge that you see things that I don't no matter the role you're in and then we could and should be having conversations and everybody can take ownership of challenges and proactively seek the solutions without hoping for a boss to make changes for them with any sort of robust uh supporting data and reasoning any team member would be encouraged to step forward and initiate action for Change and that is a very Democratic approaches if you will and the concept of leadership also gets democratized and made a little bit more accessible as in leadership is not people sitting in the executive layers of the organization actually happens anywhere and with that you create a culture of self-empowerment and every voice has a potential to contribute meaningfully driving Innovation specifically and continuous improvement from the ground app across the organization so now let's talk about the practices and kamban has six practices the first one I'm sure you've seen it everywhere visualized everything I'm sure you've seen those C boards everywhere and they're honestly a testament to um how visualizing the work is really one of the most important steps in inform Med management if you follow me for a little while you know I'm a big fan of inform decision making now while the to-do in progress done boards are helpful to very simple tasks cute in your kitchen uh or maybe if you're a very very small team that has a very simple process it usually isn't that helpful at work in an organization usually when that happens that you go for you know the scaman board with only three columns what I see is that you have a team team with 12 people each person is doing two three t two three tasks at once context switching and when you look at the board the board is just immense and you can't really see what's happening the whole point of having the board is so that interesting things jump at your eyes so there is a better way of doing a cbon board and what you want to see and represent in it is your actual process every column being the actual steps of your process and that might mean more than five or six uh columns that's you know so be it in order to improve something you first see how it is working and just watch and notice so when we talk about visualizing everything here we mean the work the process and the risks and the issues in here making everything visual so that whatever seems off jumps straight at you the key point being if you see it you know it if you know you can act on it and then the second practice is limiting the work in process whip so many people call it work in progress I like work in process because what happens is when you have something waiting forever sitting on a column and you say hey I'm just going to do something else cuz this piece of work doesn't seem to be moving so much that is bad you can't bring something else cuz the system is still overloaded once that little T task that is now blocked gets finally unblocked what do you do you already put more stuff than you could in your system so that is very wasteful that is confusing and that means that that task that was blocked before could have been gone much faster to the hands of your customer your client whoever is expecting that piece of work that work waiting there you need to go figure out how to unblock it that is work itself so nothing really is sitting and waiting and if it is and if it happens often then you know the work the whip limit is the least of your problem then we have to look into other parts of your coment system to make it better the third principle is to manage flow and we started talking about it a little bit once we introduce and manage the work in process because now that you visualize and understand the capacity of your system which is AKA your whip limit you then proactively manage the work in it can a new work item be started how to unblock another work item in my opinion and experience that is the single most ignored practice of Coman when beginners start adopting it because they use the boards and they get very excited about it sometimes they put a whip limit but even when they do they don't respect it and they don't prioritize their work items they get too much you know they relax the whip limit all the time because you know people are asking for more things so we're just going to do more things and that sort of thing they accept all sorts of interruptions not so great so the owner of the process can be the entire team but usually it is a person a project manager a line manager you know a team lead there's always someone responsible for keeping that workflow moving un interrupted while keeping an eye on any impediments bottlenecks and um all sorts of risks the fourth practice is to make policies explicit the point here is really to enhance communication and maintain consistency it also helps us make sure that the decision making process is always in informed and not necessarily subjected to emotions it also means that we understand why and how work is ready to move from one state to the next in the Canon board and it's much easier for people to exercise the principle of leadership at all levels because if I understand what should be happening at any point in the campin system and I see that something isn't happening as expected I can regardless of my role interject and make things better the fifth practice is Implement feedback loops that is actually way simpler than most people make of it in the end you need synchronization and and points to check in and see if the quality is still good if we are still delivering what we wanted is still valuable it's still on time and that can be done with several types of checkpoints it could be dashboards it could be an automation built in in how you do things or it could be meetings in which you talk to people and you check to see if things are going according to the plan but not only that it's not just about the forums of uh where the discussion take place but it's also about deciding who to inform who to consult when these things need to be disc discuss lastly the sixth practice is improve collaboratively and evolve experimentally and here just a heads up experimenting is not trying when you experiment you don't just pick up an idea and see if it works you spend a little bit of time thinking what could be causing this what could be the problem and that is very simply what we mean by formulating a hypothesis not really anything Grand but it is you give some thought and then you go and you check are there practices out there is there some theory that helps me to explain this because honestly a lot of the so-called experimentation and the generic agile bubble out there really doesn't cover hey knowledge already exists this problem has already been solved let's look for good practices if there are some we use them and we can then tweak for our own needs you don't have to keep Reinventing the wheel and many times a lot of these things are not self-evident so having a little bit of an idea of what other people have done before in what practices could be really effective here which is only possible once you really understand a little bit of the correlation of the issues at hand then you have a better chance of moving forward with an experiment where you can say I think if I do this that is going to happen and then you get to see is it really happening is it really working the way I would have wanted some of that knowledge is mentioned in my other video about the five skills that we should have as an AO coach consultant scrim Master agile manager Etc and it also has a blog post and I'll leave a link in the description down below for you I hope that gave you something to think about beyond the board however the board is where everything starts when you visualize everything like we saw so if you want to give it a try download the PDF that I Linked In the description down below and start seeing if some of those five ideas maybe one maybe all the five that you could use to make your board and the management of your work way more effective for you for your teams for your clients and if that got you excited and now you're interested in introducing a little bit more of the cand method and the link thinking into your work management you're going to love the video that's coming up next is all about the best way to start introducing in modeling or improving your canand system and it's called Static and that video will be showing up here [Music]

Channel: All Things Agile

Views: 1,597

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Id: gmmPfDCRfrQ

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024