Kanban: The Ultimate Step by Step Guide. Discover Kanban Tools and Principles and Learn how to Put the Method in Action to a Successful Business.

By Daniel Stevens

Do you feel overwhelmed with multiple things that need your attention? Do you are not as productive as you wold like to be and you're always switching from one task to another without focus on any one?

 

If you are looking for a way to manage any professional or personal work effectively and efficiently then this Complete Guide is the right for you!

 

Stop waste your precious time and become more productive without paying for expensive consultancy or guru courses.

 

This is what you will find in this fantastic Book:

1. What is Kanban and how it works
2. The principles of Kanban
3. How empower and encourage the team
4. How create a positive work environment
5. How develop your  Kanban system

... and that's not all!

• The Metrics of Kanban
• Why process policy ais necessary
• Understand WIP limit

...and much more!

 

Take advantage of this Guide!

 

What are you waiting for? Press the Buy-Now button and get started!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Stevens
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201820824

Book preview

Chapter 1 What exactly is Kanban and how it works?

Kanban is a visual management framework for tracking work as it progresses through a project. Kanban depicts both the mechanism (workflow) and the real work that passes through it. Kanban aims to find and eliminate possible bottlenecks in your process so that work can flow through it at a cost-effective rate and throughput.

TRIVIA – Kanban (also spelled kamban) is a Japanese word that means billboard (or signboard in Chinese) and refers to available ability (to work). Kanban is a scheduling method that tells you when to produce, what to produce it, and how much to produce. It is similar to lean and just-in-time (JIT) processing.

Learn the Fundamentals of Kanban:

• Where did Kanban come from?

• What is the Kanban Method, and how does it work?

• Foundational Principles of Kanban

• Kanban's Six Core Practices

• What is Kanban and how does it work? – The Thought

• Kanban WIP Limits

• IT & Software Kanban

• Kanban in the context of Lean/Agile growth

• Kanban isn't all about software and IT.

• Begin using a Kanban system.

• Where did Kanban come from? – A Quick Overview of Kanban

• The storey begins in the early 1940s. Taiichi Ohno (Industrial Engineer and Businessman) developed the first Kanban system for Toyota Automotive in Japan. It began as a straightforward planning method to optimally control and manage work and inventory at any point of development.

• One of the main reasons for the production of Kanban was Toyota's insufficient competitiveness and reliability as opposed to its American automotive competitors. Toyota used Kanban to create a compact and effective just-in-time production management system that improved efficiency while eliminating costly raw material, semi-finished material, and finished product inventory.

• A Kanban scheme, in its perfect state, manages the whole supply chain from the producer to the end user. As a result, production disruptions and overstocking of supplies at different points of the production chain will be avoided. Kanban necessitates constant process control. Avoiding bottlenecks that could bog down the manufacturing process requires special care. The aim is to increase throughput while reducing distribution lead times. Kanban has evolved into a useful tool in a number of manufacturing processes.

Kanban, Work, Work Process, Organize, Business, Office

• While Taiichi Ohno was the first to bring kanban to the manufacturing industry, David J. Anderson was the first to extend the term to IT, Software creation, and knowledge work in general in 2004. With principles like pull processes, queuing theory, and flow, David drew on the work of, T. Ohno, E.Goldratt, E. Demmings, P. Drucker, and others to describe the Kanban Method. His first Kanban book, Kanban: Successfully Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Company, was released in 2010 and is the most detailed description of the Kanban Method for information work.

• The Kanban Method is a method for improving everything you do over time, whether it's software production, IT/Ops, staffing, recruitment, marketing and sales, procurement, and so on. In reality, the Kanban Methodology's concepts can be applied to almost every business activity.

• Since the original book, the Kanban body of wisdom has abstracted and learned from the works of numerous opinion leaders! Don Reinertsen (author of Principles of Product Development Flow), Jim Benson (inventor of Personal Kanban), and others are among them.

Principles and Practices of Kanban

The Kanban Method is based on a collection of standards and procedures for controlling and optimizing work flow. It's a non-disruptive, evolutionary tool for improving an organization's operations over time. If you adopt these concepts and procedures, you'll be able to use Kanban of maximize the benefits to the business operation – improving flow, reducing turnaround time, increasing consumer satisfaction, and increasing predictability – all of which are critical in today's market.

The Kanban Methodology's four foundational concepts and six Core Practices are mentioned below:

The below are the four foundational principles:

• Start with what you're doing right now.

• Agree to work for gradual, evolutionary improvement.

• Value existing positions, duties, and work titles at first.

• Encourage leadership behavior at all levels.

• Start with what you're doing right now: The Kanban Method (hereafter referred to simply as Kanban) stresses not making immediate changes to your current setup/process. Kanban must be immediately applicable to the new workflow. The necessary improvements should be implemented progressively over time at a rate that the team is satisfied with.

• Agree to seek gradual, evolutionary change: Kanban urges you to make minor incremental improvements rather than drastic ones that can elicit opposition from your staff and company.

• Honor existing positions, duties, and work titles at first: Kanban, unlike other approaches, does not force any internal reforms. As a result, making modifications to current positions and tasks that are doing well is not appropriate. The necessary improvements will be identified and implemented collaboratively by the team. These three values assist organizations in overcoming the emotional aversion and fear of transition that often surround change efforts in the workplace.

• Facilitate acts of leadership at all levels: Kanban promotes quality growth at all levels of the organization, and it asserts that leadership should not have to come only from senior executives. People of all levels should contribute ideas and demonstrate leadership in order to make reforms that can strengthen the way their goods and services are delivered in the future.

The Kanban Method has six core practices:

• Provide a visual representation of the work cycle.

• Keep the work in progress to a minimum (Work in Progress)

• Flow Control

• Make Process Policies Clearly Definable

• Set up feedback loops

• Collaboratively improve, experiment with new ideas

• Visualize the flow of work: Visualizing the flow of work is the first and most important step in embracing and applying the Kanban Method. You must imagine the procedure steps you actually use to provide your work or services, either on a physical or interactive Kanban Board. Your Kanban board can be very basic or very elaborate, depending on the difficulty of the method and your job-mix (the various types of work pieces that you work on and deliver). When you've visualized the process, you'll be able to imagine the work you and your colleagues are currently performing.

This may be in the form of stickies or cards of various colors to represent different service classes or simply different types of work pieces. (In SwiftKanban, the colors represent the various styles of job items!) Your Kanban board should have separate Swim Lanes, one for each class of service or work item type, if you think it would be useful. However, to keep it easy at first, you could use a single swimlane to handle all of your tasks – and then rebuild the board later.

• Limit WIP (Work in Progress): Enforcing Kanban – a ‘Pull-system' – requires limiting work-in-progress (WIP). Limiting WIP encourages the staff to finish current work before moving on to new projects. As a result, work that is already in progress must be completed and labeled as final. This expands the system's capability, allowing the team to take on further work. It can be difficult to determine what the WIP limits should be at first. In reality, you can begin with no WIP restrictions. When the team begins to use Kanban, the great Don Reinertsen advises (at one of the Lean Kanban conferences) that you should begin with no WIP limitations and merely watch the initial work in progress. If you've gathered enough information, set WIP limits equal to half the average WIP for each stage of the workflow (each column on your Kanban board).

Many teams begin by setting a WIP Limit of 1 to 1.5 times the number of people employed on a particular point. Limiting WIP and setting WIP limits on each column of the board not only lets team members complete what they're working on before moving on to new tasks, but it also signals to