What is Kanban? - Agile Coach (2019)

Kanban is a work management system designed to help you visualise your work, limit work in progress, and maximise efficiency, which we call flow. Kanban is the Japanese word for visual signal. With so many of us working in services and technology, oftentimes our work is invisible or intangible.

Kanban helps you visualise your work so you can understand it better, show it to others, and keep everyone on the same page. Most teams realise this benefit by building a Kanban board, filling it with Kanban cards, and setting up a work in progress limit. I'm Max.

I'm a product marketing manager on Jira Software, and I'm naturally kind of a chaotic person. I seem to always find myself in fast-pace environments. I've been on really dysfunctional teams, and in the past been in dysfunctional organisations.

The number of times I've seen Kanban, kind of bring method to the madness, to change the culture of the organisation, and just help me get work done, has me basically shouting from the rooftops about Kanban. So I actually have a lot to say, and I've broken this conversation up into a series of videos, all here on our YouTube channel. So the first thing that I would ask is that you subscribe to the channel, so you can hear this whole conversation play out.

I want to show you something. One of my favourite things about Kanban is that Kanban starts with what you do now. This is actually one of the Kanban principles.

Another being that Kanban respects current roles and responsibilities exactly the way that they are today. You simply apply the Kanban methodology to how you currently work. Another Kanban principle is that Kanban encourages acts of leadership from all levels.

It's on the team to work together to make Kanban work for you. Now if those principles are something you can get excited about, then you might want to start by making a Kanban board. So this is what I wanted to show you.

It's a Kanban board that I built to visualise all the concepts we're covering in this video series. I just finished talking about the Kanban principles, and it's important that I started on the right side of the board here. Kanban is a pull system, which means when you have bandwidth you look to the left and pull cards from left to right.

Since I have bandwidth now, I'm ready to start my discussion of Kanban boards. Kanban boards like this one can be built on walls, windows, whiteboards, or with the suite of digital tools like Trello and Jira. Their purpose is to categorise all the stages of work that a work item flows through from something you haven't started to something that's done.

This is called a workflow. You'll notice that each stage in the workflow has its own column, and our workflow is super simple. Your work flow might be more complex, but I'd encourage you to start as simple as possible.

You can always add more columns later. So for now, I'm done with this quick explanation of Kanban boards. I'm going to take this card from something I'm doing, to somethings that's done.

Since I have bandwidth again, I'm ready to move a card from today into doing. Let's kick off our discussion of Kanban cards. For the agile software developers among us, cards should be a familiar concept.

You can think of them as one Kanban card per user story. For the rest of us we can just back up. You can think of Kanban cards as being work items.

One card per work item. You want to make cards for all the things you're working on and place them in the appropriate stage of the workflow. Kanban cards should have a title, and a description, and an owner.

You can also add any other helpful information like a due date. Then, your card should start to gain a little bit of a history. As your team leaves updates on the card, as it moves from one stage of the work flow to the other.

Kanban cards should be small enough that your team can make progress on them in a reasonable amount of time. You don't want them so large that it'll take you weeks to move the card forward, and you don't want them so small that it's literally every task that you're working on. Can you imagine how chaotic your board would be if it was every task your team was working on?

You want to avoid that. Once you build a board and you fill it with cards, you'll start to realise one of the key benefits of Kanban. You'll see columns that start to bunch up, revealing a bottle neck in your workflow.

You'll also get a sense of what size cards your team can move forward in a timely manner. These efficiencies we like to call flow, and Kanban is built to help teams flow work better from the backlog to done. Once you understand flow, you can start to measure it.

Kanban teams concern themselves with lead time, which is the time that it takes for a card to flow through your workflow from when you start working on it to when you're done. It's in the hands of the customer. And with that, I feel done with my conversations about lead time and thanks to this board that I built, I actually know that I'm done.

I have visual assurance that I've done all the things that I set out to do in this video. It's a good feeling.