How to effectively use Kanban
Introduction to Kanban
What is Kanban
Kanban is a visual workflow methodology. It originated in the 1940s in Japan for lean manufacturing but currently is also used in Agile Development and DevOps. Some of the companies using Kanban are Pixar, Zara, and Spotify.
Components of Kanban
A Kanban Board is made up of three components :
- Columns: The columns represent the visual lifecycle of the tasks. The typical ones are displayed in the image below- Backlog/ Requested, Work in progress, and Done/ Completed.
- Cards: Cards are visual tasks as shown in the image below. Each card contains information about the task and its status, such as deadline, assignee, description, etc.
- Swim-lanes: These are horizontal lines that cut across the board. They can be organized based on departments, teams, etc.
Other terms
Work in progress(WIP) limits: This maximum number of cards in the work in progress column per time period in a single swim-lane.
Throughput: The number of cards delivered in a said time period.
Cycle time of a card: The time spent by one card in the WIP column.
Kanban example
Problem: Baking a Pizza
Step 1: Break the tasks into smaller manageable chunks and list all tasks in the backlog. For our example it will be :
a. Make the pizza base
b. Add the toppings
c. Make the pizza sauce
d. Shop for the items
e. Bake the pizza
f. Add cheese
Step 2: Groom the backlog. Some of the ways we can achieve this would be:
a. Break bigger tasks into smaller tasks. For our example, we can break the task a. Make pizza base to — Making the dough and Rolling the dough
b. Merge smaller tasks. For our example, we can merge task b and f as one task — Adding Toppings and Cheese.
c. Revise our requirements. For our example, we may realize that making pizza sauce is not economical, so we can revise the requirements as buying pizza sauce
d. Backlog prioritization. As we can see the backlog is arranged randomly. We will now prioritize the backlog. Some of the ways we can prioritize are the cost of delay of the tasks, business priority, and dependency of tasks.
For our example, we will prioritize sequentially. The new board looks as follows:
Step 3: Set the initial WIP Limits. This depends on the tasks and resources available. For our example, we will set it to 1 as only 1 person is cooking. We can revise this limit till we get an optimal limit.
4. Move the tasks one by one from the backlog to work progress and then to the done section. Let's say we complete tasks a to e. Now for baking the pizza we need to heat the oven before we can bake. We will now put the task bake pizza in the impeded swim-lane, add a new task heat the oven and add it to our Work in progress column. Once the reason for our impediment is resolved, move that task back into the default swim-lane.
Step 5: Track metrics and revise WIP Limits, breakdown of tasks and resources. Track metrics at different times such as cycle time and throughput to optimize delivery.
Step 6: Declare Victory. Once you have moved all the cards to the done section, you have completed the project. Use metrics and lessons learned and apply them to the next project. Identify your constraints and blockers.