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Let’s take a closer look, most likely   you first heard the word agile methodology at work or in other articles, then read it and came across this page while looking for a way to operationalize this concept!

This is true? Whatever your answer is, you’ve come to the right place! Kanban is an engine that will keep your project organized!

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a Japanese word meaning notice board; It’s the same famous board you see in different team rooms! This board is actually a symbol that shows the team’s capacity to perform various tasks and tasks. Kanban is a workflow management method that focuses on defining and managing work and improving the information transfer system in the project. A Kanban visually shows us both the work process and the task that needs to be done.

Kanban aims to detect and correct possible bottlenecks in the project process so that the project can progress without additional costs and at the appropriate pace.

The Kanban methodology is a process for gradually improving everything you do. Whether  in the field of IT  , software development, human resources, recruitment, marketing and sales, logistics and any other field you can think of! In fact, almost every part of the business can benefit from applying Kanban principles.

The knowledge-based Kanban methodology has benefited from the thoughts and perspectives of various experts in the field of planning and productivity from the time the book was written (yes, there is a book on Kanban!) until today. It has become a comprehensive and powerful way to move projects forward.

Don Reiner-Tsen (author of “Principles of Product Development Flow”), Jim Benson (pioneer of the “Personal Kanban” idea), and many others have contributed to this field.

An ideal Kanban system controls the entire value chain, from supplier to end consumer. In this way, the Kanban system helps prevent disruptions in the supply of goods and excessive storage at different stages of production. The Kanban system requires constant monitoring of the process. Special care must be taken to avoid bottlenecks that could slow down the production process. The aim is to reduce product delivery time while increasing the company’s operational efficiency. Over time, Kanban has become an effective method in many production systems.

The emergence of Kanban, the emergence of a hero!

To find the origins of the invention of Kanban, we need to go to West Asia many years ago! It all started in Japan in the early 1940s, when an industrial engineer named Taichi Ono was looking for a way to improve his project management method and increase his company’s efficiency; Today, it is a start-up company whose name we are all familiar with; Toyota automobile company is in Japan!

The main reason for the development of the Kanban system was the weakness of its parent company, Toyota, against the American automobile giants; Toyota was suffering from poor productivity and low efficiency, and so Mr. Taichi was looking for a way to solve these problems, and out of this weakness emerged a system that could stand in the way of the planning methods of the world’s major automotive powers. : Kanban system!

Kanban was originally created as a simple planning system that could help engineers and managers control and manage work and inventory at every stage of production. With the help of Kanban, he achieved a flexible and efficient system for just-in-time production; This system not only increased the productivity of the entire company, but also reduced the staggering costs of storing raw materials, semi-finished parts and finished products.

Basic principles of Kanban

Kanban methodology follows principles and methods to manage and improve workflow. It is a transformative and non-destructive method that causes gradual improvements in all processes of an organization. If you follow these principles and methods, you can successfully maximize the benefits of using a Kanban system and benefit from improved workflow, reduced cycle time, increased customer value and better predictability, which are important for every business. The Kanban system has 4 basic principles and 6 central methods; we will learn about them below and then examine each of them.

Start with what you’re doing right now

The Kanban methodology strongly emphasizes not making any changes to your previous settings and processes. Essentially, Kanban needs to be applied directly to the current workflow, not to work that has already been done. Any necessary changes should occur gradually over a period of time and at a pace the team is comfortable with.

Agree to follow evolutionary changes

Making radical and sudden changes in the team structure and the way things are done can disrupt the current order of the team and trigger resistance from team members and the organization. It is difficult for people to get used to sudden changes and it can take a long time. Instead of making sudden changes to the existing structure and increasing the pressure on members, the Kanban system recommends making small, evolutionary changes so that people can get used to the new method more easily.

Respect all current job roles, responsibilities and titles

Unlike many  project management methods,  the Kanban system itself does not impose any changes on the organization. Therefore, there is no need to change existing job titles and well-functioning processes. The team itself will collaboratively understand any necessary changes and implement them. These three principles help the organization overcome the feeling of resistance and fear of change that often arises when making changes in the organization.

Promote appropriate team leadership practices at all levels of the organization

The Kanban system encourages continuous improvement of the situation at all levels of the organization and states that leadership behaviors do not necessarily originate from managers, but rather that people at all levels in the organization can put forward their ideas and use their leadership skills. This spontaneous behavior can lead to beneficial changes and continuous improvement of the current state of product and service delivery.

Important and basic steps of Kanban

Change in the process of doing things is always difficult and companies often resist such changes, but in order to best implement the Kanban project management system in your organization, it is necessary to follow its steps accurately and accurately. The principled path: progress from visualizing the workflow to creating feedback loops and collaborative systems, where we will learn more about each of these steps below.

Workflow visualization

This action is the first essential step in approving and implementing the Kanban system. Each process consists of different stages, and in these stages you deliver your work or perform a service; The first step to implementing the Kanban system is to visualize these steps, you can use a physical board or a digital board depending on the complexity of the process and job. Depending on how complex the processes are, your Kanban board can range from very simple to very complex.

When you visualize processes, you can visualize what you are currently doing. Kanban board design can be done in different ways, it depends on your creativity and interest in categorizing the details. You can use different colored stickers or cards for each department or service, or display categories in different colors.

How the details will be arranged and how they will be implemented is up to your wishes. You can use separate rows for each activity category if you find it useful. Anyway, to avoid complicating things in the beginning, you can have one general queue, manage everything with it, and redo the design after some time.

Limit work in progress

To implement the Kanban system, it is necessary to limit the work in progress. This way, you encourage your team to first finish what they started and then start a new task. As a result, the work in progress must be completed and marked as completed. This action creates capacity in the team as space is provided for input of new tasks. Deciding to limit work may not be easy at first.

You can actually start without restrictions; One of the founders of the Kanban system recommends that you start your activity without any restrictions and monitor the initial activity when starting to use the Kanban system. Once you have sufficient knowledge of how things are done and see the pattern of team activities, you can set rules and standards for workflow constraints for each activity level on the Kanban board. Typically, many teams quote the number of limited events as approximately 1 to 1.5 times the number of active members at each level.

Limiting workflow and enforcing rules for each task level not only helps the team complete existing work before taking on a new responsibility, but also ensures that clients and project owners have ample time to communicate and make assignments with each team. opinions were exchanged. In this way, product owners realize that every moment is valuable for the team and prepare their requests and opinions before holding a meeting to exchange views.

workflow management

After applying the first two steps of the Kanban system to team activities, the result will be better management and improved workflow. The Kanban system helps you manage the workflow by specifying the workflow’s different stages and the work status at each stage. Depending on how well the workflow is defined and how accurately the work constraints are applied, you will either end up with a smooth flow of activities, or you will find that work is piling up. Something is preventing the team from increasing its capacity.

It depends on how quickly things move from the beginning to the end of the workflow. A Kanban system helps your team analyze the current system and make changes that will improve workflow and reduce the time to perform each activity. An important aspect of the process of observing workflow, finding and eliminating bottlenecks is that you can calculate the average time it takes to complete each activity.

This way, you will know how much time each activity spends in the waiting phase and how much time it spends in the pre-completion phase. Along the way, you will learn how much time you need to devote to each activity, and thus you will reach an important point: the main way to reduce the overall cycle time is to reduce the time spent on each activity. As workflow improves, your team learns to perform tasks more smoothly and their activities become more predictable.

As the predictability of activities increases, it becomes easier to make reliable commitments to customers, even when they are in the process of placing orders, assessing what they want, and even if you haven’t done anything for them yet. Improvement in estimating project completion time with a reliable memory is one of the biggest benefits of implementing the Kanban system.

Clarifying the rules regarding the processes

Just like visualizing processes on a Kanban board, it makes sense to visualize the policies, rules, and guidelines for getting things done. By developing guidelines for each process, you design a common foundation for all employees to learn how to do each part of the job. Rules can be applied in the column corresponding to each section on the board. You can consider a checklist, step-by-step guide, and start and end conditions for each section and display them on the dashboard.

Create feedback application loops

Feedback loops are an integral part of any good system. The Kanban method encourages and helps teams implement different types of feedback loops, such as reviewing steps, metrics, reports, and other visual cues on the Kanban board that give clues about the quality of work done. There is a saying among successful teams: “Fail fast, fail hard!”.

This saying is less understood among startup teams, but the idea of ​​getting feedback at every stage, especially in the early stages of the project, is crucial to delivering the perfect project, product or service as quickly as possible. Feedback loops are critical to ensure the quality of the final result, and with their help you can deliver a project that meets all the client’s expectations.

Develop experientially and collaboratively

Kanban methodology is an evolutionary improvement process. And Kanban helps you make small changes and incremental improvements at a speed and scale that the team can easily adapt to. Kanban encourages teams to use scientific methods; In this way, you propose a hypothesis, measure it, test it, and implement the necessary changes based on the results obtained. As a team applying the principles of the agile methodology, your main task is to evaluate the process constantly and, if necessary and possible, continuously improve it.

The impact of every change you make can be observed and measured with the help of various signals provided by the Kanban system. Using these signals, you can evaluate whether a change is beneficial and decide whether to continue that way or try something else. The Kanban system helps you gain a lot of information about the performance of your system; It doesn’t matter whether you use a physical card or a digital card. With the help of the obtained data and appropriate criteria, you can easily evaluate the improvement or decline in your team’s performance and provide support to your team when needed!

How does Kanban work?

Up to this point, we have talked a lot about the basic concepts, principles, rules and benefits of using the Kanban system, and we are very confident that using the Kanban system can lead us to our goals. However, the question remains unanswered: How to use the Kanban system? There were explanations about this in the previous sections, now we want to touch on this issue a little more clearly.

Kanban is a non-disruptive management system based on evolutionary change. This means that the current process can be improved in small steps. Risk is reduced by making many small changes (rather than one large change). The evolutionary Kanban method leads to low resistance in the team and other project owners.

As we mentioned before, the first step in implementing the Kanban system is to describe the workflow. This action is done in the form of a Kanban board. A Kanban board (in physical form) is a simple whiteboard with some stickers or cards stuck on it. Each card on the board represents a responsibility. The classic Kanban board model has four columns that display the following sections, as in the image above:

• Overdue tasks  : Overdue tasks are included in this section.
• Pending:  This column shows the list of tasks that have not yet been started.
• In Progress:  This column contains tasks that are in progress.
• Completed:  This column contains completed tasks.

Even a simple visualization alone can create clarity about work distribution and potential bottlenecks. Of course, Kanban boards can represent a detailed workflow, depending on the complexity of the workflow and the need to visualize and review specific parts of the workflow in order to eliminate bottlenecks. With flow and pumping of existing issues, even your team can identify them and come up with solutions to deal with them.

The concept of “workflow” in the Kanban system

The essence of the Kanban system is the concept of workflow. This concept means that cards should move as much as possible through the system without remaining stationary for too long or behind an obstacle. Anything that hinders the flow of tasks should be seriously considered. Kanban has different techniques, criteria and models that must be used constantly.

Continued use of this tool can create a culture of continuous improvement in the team. The concept of workflow is critical in a Kanban system, and by measuring workflow metrics and working to improve them, you can see increased efficiency while reducing cycle time and improving the quality of products and services by receiving faster feedback from your customers. from processes.

Limitations of workflow in the Kanban system

One of the important aspects of Kanban is that this system reduces the amount of multitasking. Multitasking is one of the activities that teams tend to do. The Kanban system instead encourages teams to avoid starting new tasks before previous tasks are completed.

Finishing unfinished business is more important than starting new ones. To achieve this goal, Kanban introduces the concept of workflow constraints, where rules and regulations for tasks are taken into account and recorded on the Kanban board in each task’s section to prevent new tasks from being started even though there are incomplete tasks. To come.

In this article, we met the Kanban project management system and learned how to apply it, but there are also different platforms such as Scrum and Scrumban to use modern management methods such as agile methodology, and Kanban is one of these platforms. Enjoy the benefits of organizing your tasks and projects. If you have experience using this system in your projects, you can share it with us in the comments section. You can also learn about other people’s experiences, ask questions and talk to others.