Introduction to Kanban: A Visual Workflow Management Method

Introduction to Kanban: A Visual Workflow Management Method

Kanban is a visual workflow management method designed to enhance efficiency through better visibility of work. Originating from the Japanese word for "signboard" or "billboard," Kanban helps teams manage their work by visualizing both the process and the actual work passing through that process. The primary goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them so that work can flow through it cost-effectively at an optimal speed or throughput.

What makes Kanban particularly powerful is its evolutionary approach: you start with what you do now and improve incrementally. You don't need to abandon your current processes or reorganize your teams to benefit from Kanban.

What is Kanban?

History

Kanban was developed in the late 1940s by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota automotive in Japan. Its development was inspired by the just-in-time (JIT) production system, which aims to increase productivity and efficiency while decreasing waste. Originally a scheduling system for lean manufacturing, Kanban became an effective tool in production to ensure that the necessary components are replenished and available just in time.

The system's simplicity made it adaptable outside manufacturing, and it has since been applied to various sectors including software development, IT, business process work, and services. In software development, for example, Kanban facilitates Agile and Lean practices by helping teams release software early and often.

In the 2000s, David J. Anderson formalized the method adapted for knowledge work and software development, detailing the approach in his book, "Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business." This adaptation has led to the widespread use of Kanban boards as a tool for managing work in numerous industries around the world.

Core Components of Kanban

Before diving into principles and practices, it's essential to understand the basic building blocks of a Kanban system.

The Kanban Board

The Kanban board is the fundamental visualization tool in the Kanban methodology, designed to help teams see their work, understand flow, and identify problems.

Structure:

• Columns: Each column represents a stage in your workflow process. Common columns include "To Do," "In Progress," "Review," and "Done," but these should be customized to reflect your actual process stages.
• Cards: Each card represents a single task or work item. Cards move from left to right as they progress through the workflow stages. Each card typically contains the task title, description, assignee, and any other relevant information like due dates or priority.
• Swimlanes: Some boards include horizontal lanes that categorize tasks by type, priority, team, or other relevant groupings. This provides an additional dimension of organization.

Visual Signals:

• Color Coding: Cards can be color-coded to convey information at a glance - urgency, type of work, team responsible, or risk level.
• Limit Indicators: Visual markers that alert the team when a column is approaching or has reached its Work in Progress (WIP) limit.
• Blockers: Many teams use special markers or colors to highlight blocked items that cannot progress.

Physical vs. Digital Boards:

Physical boards (whiteboards with sticky notes) work well for co-located teams. They provide high visibility and make board updates a collaborative activity. Digital boards are essential for remote or distributed teams and offer advantages like automatic metrics, notifications, and integrations with other tools. Popular digital tools include Jira, Trello, Azure DevOps, and specialized Kanban tools like Kanbanize or LeanKit.

Board Design Examples

Different teams need different board structures. Here are some common patterns:

Software Development Team:

Backlog → Selected for Development → In Development → Code Review → Testing → Done

Support/Service Team:

Incoming Requests → Triage → Working → Waiting for Customer → Resolved → Closed

Marketing/Content Team:

Ideas → Planned → Creating → Review → Approved → Published

The key is to design your board to reflect your actual workflow, not an idealized one. Start with what you do now, and refine over time.

Understanding Pull Systems

A fundamental concept in Kanban is the "pull system." In a pull system, work is pulled into the next stage only when there is capacity to handle it, rather than being pushed through regardless of capacity.

Push vs. Pull:

• Push: Tasks are assigned and moved forward regardless of whether the next stage has capacity. This often leads to queues, context switching, and reduced quality.
• Pull: Work moves to the next stage only when that stage has capacity (hasn't reached its WIP limit). This creates a more sustainable, steady flow.

When a team member completes a task, they pull the next highest-priority item from the previous stage. This creates a natural flow and prevents any stage from becoming overwhelmed with work.

Foundational Practices

Kanban is built on six foundational practices that define how teams use the system:

1. Visualize the Workflow

Make all work visible on the Kanban board. By seeing the status of every piece of work at any time, teams can understand the flow of work and identify bottlenecks or interruptions in real-time. Visualization transforms invisible knowledge work into something tangible that the whole team can discuss and manage.

2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)

Constrain how much unfinished work is allowed at each stage of the process. This ensures that a team focuses only on the work they can handle effectively at one time. WIP limits are typically displayed on the board above each column.

Setting WIP Limits: A common starting point is to set limits at approximately 1.5 times the number of people working in that stage. For example, if three people work in the "In Development" stage, start with a WIP limit of 4-5 items. For specialized stages like code review, consider lower limits equal to the number of reviewers available.

The magic of WIP limits is that when a column reaches its limit, the team must focus on completing existing work before starting something new. This often leads to collaboration, as team members swarm to resolve blockers and move work forward.

3. Manage Flow

Monitor how work moves through the system and actively manage this flow to ensure smooth progress. Managing flow means paying attention to how long items spend in each stage, identifying where work piles up, and taking action such as adjusting WIP limits, adding capacity to bottleneck stages, or breaking down large work items into smaller pieces.

4. Make Process Policies Explicit

Define and communicate the rules that govern how work flows through the system. This includes:

• Definition of Ready: What criteria must be met before a task can enter a stage? For example, before development starts, the task must have clear requirements and design approval.
• Definition of Done: What criteria must be met before a task can leave a stage? For development, this might include "code written, tests passing, code reviewed."
• Prioritization rules: How does the team decide what to pull next?
• Blocker policies: How are blocked items marked and escalated?

Explicit policies eliminate ambiguity, ensure consistency, and make it easier for new team members to understand the workflow.

5. Implement Feedback Loops

Build regular opportunities for the team to review their work and process. Many Kanban teams use:

• Daily standup/team sync: Brief daily meetings to review the board, identify blockers, and coordinate work.
• Service delivery review: Regular review of completed work and delivery metrics.
• Operations review: Periodic deep-dive into process metrics and workflow health.
• Retrospectives: Regular reflection on what's working and what could improve.

These feedback loops enable continuous learning and ensure the team stays aligned.

6. Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally

Continuous improvement is fundamental to Kanban. Teams are encouraged to experiment with process changes using a scientific approach: form a hypothesis, make a small change, measure the impact, and either adopt the change broadly or try something different. This experimental mindset, grounded in data from metrics, drives ongoing evolution of the process.

Change Management Principles

In addition to the foundational practices, Kanban includes specific principles for how to introduce and manage change:

Start with What You Do Now

This is perhaps the most important principle of Kanban. You don't need to restructure your team, abandon your current processes, or adopt a completely new methodology. Instead, map your current workflow onto a Kanban board and begin from there. This lowers the barrier to adoption and allows teams to improve gradually without the disruption of a major transformation.

Agree to Pursue Incremental, Evolutionary Change

Rather than attempting large-scale transformation, Kanban emphasizes small, continuous improvements. This approach reduces resistance to change, allows the team to learn what works through experimentation, and creates sustainable progress over time.

Encourage Acts of Leadership at All Levels

Improvement ideas can come from anyone on the team. Kanban encourages everyone to observe the system, identify problems, and propose solutions. This distributed leadership creates engagement and leverages the full intelligence of the team.

Focus on Customer Needs and Expectations

All process decisions should be evaluated through the lens of customer value. Does this change help us deliver better value to customers faster? Does it improve quality or responsiveness? Keeping customer needs central ensures that process improvements drive meaningful outcomes.

Key Benefits of Using Kanban

Enhanced Visibility: Everyone can see the status of all work in real-time, which helps identify bottlenecks, balance workloads, and promotes accountability.

Increased Efficiency: By limiting work in progress, Kanban reduces cycle times and increases throughput. Teams complete work faster when they focus on fewer things at once.

Flexibility and Responsiveness: Kanban's pull system makes it easy to adapt to changing priorities and respond to urgent issues without disrupting the entire workflow.

Reduced Waste: Visualization and flow management help identify and eliminate waste such as unnecessary handoffs, waiting time, and rework.

Better Collaboration: When a stage hits its WIP limit, team members naturally collaborate to resolve blockers and move work forward together.

Continuous Improvement: Built-in feedback loops and experimental mindset drive ongoing process evolution and learning.

Predictability: Over time, historical data enables probabilistic forecasting, allowing teams to make commitments with greater confidence.

Kanban vs. Other Agile Methodologies

Understanding how Kanban differs from other Agile approaches can help teams choose the right fit.

Kanban vs. Scrum

Cadence: Scrum works in fixed-length sprints (typically 2-4 weeks). Kanban has no prescribed time boxes - work flows continuously.

Roles: Scrum prescribes specific roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, Development Team). Kanban doesn't require new roles - it works with your existing structure.

Ceremonies: Scrum has mandatory ceremonies (sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, retrospective). Kanban doesn't prescribe specific meetings, though teams typically adopt regular feedback loops.

Change: In Scrum, the sprint backlog is typically locked during the sprint. In Kanban, priorities can change at any time as capacity becomes available.

Metrics: Scrum focuses on velocity (story points completed per sprint). Kanban focuses on flow metrics (lead time, cycle time, throughput).

Kanban vs. Extreme Programming (XP)

XP is a software development methodology with specific engineering practices (pair programming, test-driven development, continuous integration). Kanban is a workflow management method that doesn't prescribe engineering practices. Many teams combine Kanban for workflow management with XP practices for technical excellence.

When to Choose Kanban

Kanban is particularly effective in these scenarios:

Changing or Unpredictable Priorities: When customer demands or requirements change frequently, Kanban's flexibility allows teams to adapt without disrupting flow.

Continuous Delivery Environments: For teams that need to deliver work continuously (software operations, IT support, content production), Kanban enables steady flow without artificial sprint boundaries.

Process Improvement Focus: When teams want to improve their existing processes gradually, Kanban's "start where you are" approach and emphasis on visualization naturally reveals improvement opportunities.

New to Agile: For teams transitioning from traditional project management, Kanban provides a gentle introduction without requiring adoption of all Agile ceremonies and roles immediately.

Service and Support Work: When work arrives unpredictably and varies in size and complexity, Kanban's pull system helps manage fluctuating workloads effectively.

Multiple Stakeholders: When work requires input from various stakeholders who aren't always available simultaneously, Kanban's flexible flow accommodates this reality.

When Kanban May Not Fit

Kanban isn't always the best choice:

Fixed-Scope Projects with Hard Deadlines: Traditional projects with fixed scope, timeline, and budget may benefit from waterfall or staged-gate approaches.

Teams That Need Structure: Some teams thrive with the prescribed structure of methodologies like Scrum. Kanban's flexibility requires discipline.

Regulatory Environments Requiring Phase Gates: Industries with mandatory approval gates may need more structured approaches.

Lack of Team Discipline: Kanban requires teams to maintain the board, respect WIP limits, and engage in continuous improvement. Without discipline, the system breaks down.

Classes of Service

Not all work has the same urgency or risk profile. Classes of Service help teams prioritize and manage different types of work appropriately:

Expedite: Critical, time-sensitive items that need immediate attention (production outages, security issues). These can bypass WIP limits but should be rare. Many teams visualize these with red cards or a dedicated expedite lane.

Fixed Date: Work with a specific deadline (regulatory requirement, marketing campaign tied to event). These need careful monitoring to ensure they complete on time.

Standard: Normal work that follows regular prioritization. Most work falls into this category.

Intangible: Low-priority work that improves the system but has no external deadline (technical debt, process improvements, learning activities). These are important for long-term health but can be deferred if capacity is tight.

Visualizing classes of service through color coding or swimlanes helps teams make better prioritization decisions and ensures that different types of work receive appropriate attention.

Advanced Metrics

Beyond the basic metrics of lead time, cycle time, and throughput, Kanban teams often track:

Flow Efficiency

Flow Efficiency measures what percentage of time work items are actively being worked on versus waiting.

Flow Efficiency = (Active Time / Total Lead Time) × 100%

For example, if a task has a lead time of 10 days but only 3 days of active work, the flow efficiency is 30%. Low flow efficiency indicates waste in the system - work spending too much time waiting. Many teams are surprised to discover their flow efficiency is only 10-20%, revealing significant improvement opportunities.

Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD)

A Cumulative Flow Diagram shows the amount of work in each stage of your workflow over time. The vertical axis shows the number of work items, and the horizontal axis shows time. Each stage is represented as a colored band.

CFDs reveal:

• WIP trends: Growing bands indicate work accumulating in that stage
• Throughput: The slope of the "Done" band shows delivery rate
• Bottlenecks: Stages where work consistently accumulates
• Flow stability: Smooth, parallel bands indicate healthy flow; erratic bands suggest instability

Service Level Expectations (SLEs)

Rather than making commitments based on estimates, mature Kanban teams use historical data to create probabilistic forecasts. An SLE might be: "85% of standard work items will be completed within 10 days."

This approach is based on actual past performance and provides a realistic expectation that accounts for natural variation. It's more honest and usually more accurate than traditional estimation.

Daily Operations with Kanban

What does a typical day look like when using Kanban?

Morning: Many teams start with a brief standup (10-15 minutes) at the Kanban board. The team walks the board from right to left (focusing on completing work before starting new work), discussing:

• What's blocked and needs help?
• What's close to done and needs attention?
• Who has capacity to pull new work?

Throughout the Day: Team members update cards as work progresses, moving them across the board. When someone completes a task and has capacity, they check if their current stage has hit its WIP limit. If not, they pull the next highest-priority item from the previous stage.

When Hitting WIP Limits: If a stage reaches its WIP limit, team members can't pull new work. Instead, they collaborate to help move existing work forward. This might mean:

• Helping with code reviews
• Working together to resolve a blocker
• Splitting a large item into smaller pieces
• Testing work that's waiting for verification

Weekly/Bi-weekly: Teams review their metrics (lead time, cycle time, throughput, CFD) to identify trends and improvement opportunities. They discuss:

• Are cycle times increasing or decreasing?
• Where are bottlenecks appearing?
• Are our WIP limits still appropriate?
• What experiments should we try?

Setting Up Your First Kanban Board

Here's a practical guide to get started:

Week 1: Setup

1. Map Your Current Workflow: Don't design an ideal workflow - map what you actually do today. Gather the team and identify the major stages work goes through from request to completion.

2. Create Your Board: Set up columns for each stage. Start simple - you can always add sophistication later.

3. Add Your Work: Create cards for everything currently in progress or waiting to start. Be honest about work in progress - this often reveals that you have far more concurrent work than expected.

4. Set Initial WIP Limits: Start with 1.5-2x the number of people working in each stage. These are experimental - you'll adjust them based on experience.

5. Define Basic Policies: What does "ready for development" mean? What does "done" mean? Document these so everyone understands.

Weeks 2-4: Observe and Learn

Use the board daily. Update it in real-time. Pay attention to:

• Where does work pile up?
• How long do items typically spend in each stage?
• How often are WIP limits violated?
• What causes work to get blocked?

Don't make changes yet - just observe and collect data.

Month 2: First Adjustments

Based on your observations:

• Adjust WIP limits if they're consistently too high or too low
• Refine column definitions to better reflect your work
• Add or remove columns based on what you learned
• Improve policies based on confusion or ambiguity you discovered

Months 3-6: Continuous Refinement

Continue the cycle of observing, measuring, experimenting, and adjusting. Introduce more sophisticated practices as the team becomes comfortable:

• Classes of service
• Swimlanes for different work types
• More detailed metrics and tracking
• Regular operations reviews

Real-World Considerations

Remote and Distributed Teams

For remote teams, a digital Kanban tool is essential. Consider:

• Tool Integration: Choose a tool that integrates with your other systems (Slack, email, CI/CD, etc.)
• Notifications: Configure notifications so team members stay aware of changes without being overwhelmed
• Video Standups: Conduct daily standups via video while sharing screens to view the board together
• Async Updates: Encourage team members to add comments and updates to cards for visibility

Cultural Challenges

Common resistance patterns and how to address them:

"We don't have time to update the board": The board saves time by reducing status meetings and miscommunication. Make updating the board as frictionless as possible.

"This is just more overhead": Start with the simplest possible board and demonstrate value before adding sophistication.

"Management wants us to do Kanban": The most successful Kanban adoptions come from teams choosing it themselves. Focus on solving the team's pain points, not satisfying management mandates.

"We're already doing Scrum/another method": Kanban's "start where you are" principle means you don't abandon what's working. Many teams successfully blend approaches.

Tool Selection

Start Physical if Co-located: If your team works in the same location, start with a physical whiteboard and sticky notes. The tactile nature and visibility often creates better engagement initially.

Choose Digital for Remote Teams: Essential for distributed teams. Popular options:

• Jira: Powerful for software teams, extensive customization, strong reporting
• Trello: Simple and visual, great for small teams or Kanban beginners
• Azure DevOps: Strong for Microsoft-centric organizations, good integration
• Asana: Good for non-technical teams, clean interface
• Specialized Tools: Kanbanize, LeanKit, SwiftKanban offer advanced Kanban-specific features

Consider: ease of use, integration needs, reporting capabilities, cost, and support for Kanban-specific features like WIP limits and CFDs.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Overcomplicating the Board: Start simple. A board with too many columns or categories creates confusion. Begin with 4-6 columns reflecting your major workflow stages, then add complexity only when clearly needed.

Setting and Forgetting WIP Limits: WIP limits aren't set in stone. If they're consistently too high or low, or if the team regularly violates them, reassess and adjust.

Treating the Board as a Reporting Tool: The board is a workflow management tool for the team, not a status dashboard for management. When teams feel they're updating the board "for management," engagement drops.

Not Making Policies Explicit: Ambiguous policies lead to confusion and inconsistency. Write down what "ready" and "done" mean for each stage, even if it seems obvious.

Ignoring Blocked Work: Blocked items are often pushed to the side and forgotten. Make blocked work highly visible and review blockers daily to resolve them quickly.

Failing to Review Metrics: Collecting metrics without reviewing them provides no value. Schedule regular time to look at your data and discuss what it's telling you.

Resistance to Collaborative Completion: When a stage hits its WIP limit, team members sometimes wait for capacity rather than helping to complete existing work. Emphasize collaborative completion over individual task ownership.

Getting Started: Your First Steps

1. Gather Your Team: Explain that you want to experiment with visualizing your work to identify improvement opportunities.

2. Map Your Current Process: Don't redesign - just capture what you actually do today.

3. Create Your Board: Start simple with physical or digital, depending on your team's location.

4. Set Initial WIP Limits: Use 1.5-2x team size as a starting point.

5. Use It Daily: Make the board your team's central coordination point.

6. Review After Two Weeks: What did you learn? What needs adjustment?

7. Iterate: Continue the cycle of using, observing, measuring, and improving.

Remember: Kanban is about evolutionary improvement, not revolutionary change. Start small, learn from experience, and let the system evolve to meet your team's needs.

Conclusion

Kanban is a powerful yet accessible approach to workflow management. Its strength lies in its simplicity and evolutionary nature - you don't need to abandon your current processes or adopt a complex new methodology. Instead, you start by visualizing your work, limiting work in progress, and focusing on flow.

The key to success with Kanban is consistency, team engagement, and a commitment to continuous improvement. By visualizing work, managing flow through WIP limits, and regularly reviewing metrics, teams can achieve greater efficiency, better collaboration, and higher-quality outcomes.

Whether you're a software development team, a support organization, a marketing department, or any other knowledge work team, Kanban provides a flexible framework for understanding and improving how you work. Start with what you do now, make it visible, and begin the journey of continuous improvement.

• ← Previous
  Professional Journaling: A Daily Practice for Productivity, Clarity, and Growth