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Kanban was originally created as part of the Toyota Production System in the late 1940's when Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, was inspired by American supermarkets' ability to maintain items in stock. He codified this into the Kanban method for use in Toyota assembly lines.
In the 80 years since, Kanban has been incorporated into many agile methods and is probably one of the most recognisable artefacts of an agile team. It is still also commonly used in Lean manufacturing as well as personal productivity.
My journey with Kanban started in 2005 when my business at the time had grown to a point where I could no longer keep all of the details of the various projects we had in flight in my head. What's the status of Project X? When do we need to bill Project Y? Are there any issues with Project Z I need to address? Long story short, I needed a quick and easy method to gain visibility and transparency into our work.
Kanban provided that to us in spades, pretty much instantly. The real benefit, though, was in that it enabled us to make improvements to our process. It became apparent pretty quickly where we had constraints and bottlenecks with our process and gave us the metrics to measure productivity improvements over time.
Kanban is very simple to get started with, and there are only five "easy" steps (download this and all productivity step by step posters here):
1. Visualise the Work
The first step is to create a visual representation of your work. We started this as a physical board on a wall, and I still recommend people start there. There are a plethora of digital tools to keep the visualisation online (and are great for hybrid and remote teams), but move it there once you have it working the way you want.
Work visualisation starts with the process work follows. At a minimum To Do, Doing, and Done. Each step in the process flow becomes a column on the board.
You then create "cards" for each work item you want to track and place them in the appropriate column for where they currently sits in the process.
2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)
The second step is to put a limit on how many work items can be in "doing" columns at any point in time. The point of this is to "stop starting and start finishing" as well as to highlight where there are bottlenecks in your process. If everything is in progress, it can be quite hard to see where constraints exist.
I remember this particular point being very hard to get my head around. How could it possibly be true that more stuff gets done if you work on less things at a time??? It took a while of looking at the metrics, but the fact of the matter is that it's an unassailably truth (if you're interested in the science, check out the Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt).
3. Make Policies Explicit
The third step is for the team (or individual if used for personal productivity) to create the 'rules' for how work gets done. My recommendation is to start with making it explicit how work is prioritised. If you're limiting your WIP, you want to make sure the most important work is in progress!
4. Focus on Flow
Pay attention to what the work visualisation is telling you as you progress. Is work piling up in a certain column? Are WIP Limits being broken in a certain area or for a particular reason? Is work not moving on the board? All of these will point to a potential area for improvement with your process.
Pro Tip:
Use the "squint test" to look at your board. Don't read the detail of the cards, but squint your eyes and look at the "shape" of cards on the board. What does it tell you?
5. Continuous Improvement
Apply a Kaizen mindset, or continuous small changes, to your process. I'm a big science geek, so I love using the scientific method to run experiments on process. When we first started, we would run an experiment every week and measure its success (or failure) using the throughput, or number of work items completed in that week. Another good metric to use in conjunction with throughput is cycle time, or the amount of time a work item takes to complete the process.
What about personal Kanban?
My journey with Kanban started with team productivity, but I have also incorporated it into personal productivity as well. The steps to start using it are exactly the same, and I usually recommend keeping the process, or columns, of the work visualisation very simple to start with (To Do, Doing, Done). Using elements of GTD, I have also used Kanban boards for weekly to do items (Week 1, Week 2, Week3, etc.), and also included a Prioritised column in the To Do, Doing, Done. It's all about continuous improvement and finding what works best for you!
If you're interested in more information on Kanban, or some of the other methods I mentioned here such as Kaizen, GTD, or prioritisation, check out the free downloads on our products page for all of our step by step productivity hacks.