awesome-agile-essentials

Kanban

Source: https://lifehacker.com/productivity-101-how-to-use-personal-kanban-to-visuali-1687948640

Definitions

Kanban (看板) (signboard or billboard in Japanese) is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing (JIT). [Source]

Key Concept: Just-In-Time

• Supermarkets don’t order a large quantity of one particular product
• They tend to order smaller amounts and then re-order ““just-in-time” when stocks are low
• This form of scheduling system keeps the right amount of products on the shelves at any given time

Emergence of Kanban: Toyota

• Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency
• Toyota engineers applied a visual management system by using actual cards on a bulletin board to show the steps in their manufacturing process

6 Key Elements of Kanban

1. Limit Work In Progress: Focus on starting, finishing, and releasing a smaller number of features
2. Manage Flow: Flow is the concept of moving items quickly through the system
3. Feedback Loops: Consider improvements and reflect on the specifics
4. Improve/Evolve: Run experiments and try to improve
5. Visualize: Use a highly visual status board which shows all of the status, bottlenecks, and system limits
6. Explicit Policies: Monitor policies like Definition of Done to track the deliverables

Kanban Board

• A visual systym containing columns that represent the status of an item/task
• A typical set of column/status contains:
  1. “To Do”
  2. “In Progress”
  3. “Test”
  4. “Done”
• Each column will have limits, as in the highest number of items/tasks that one column/status can hold at a time - this limits Work In Progress items, one of the key elements of Kanban

Resources

• Personal Kanban - by Author Jim Benson
• Essential Kanban Condensed - by David J Anderson and Andy Carmichael
• Productivity 101: How to Use Personal Kanban to Visualize Your Work

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