Pluralsight

Notes from Kanban Fundamentals course on Pluralsight

Here are my notes from the very good Pluralsight course Kanban fundamentals by Steve Smith.

Kanban = kan (visual) & ban (card)
Taiichi Ono from Toyota 1920ies
Kanban is about maximizing flow
It’s for visualizing work and limiting WIP (work in progress)
Little’s Law states that queue length (L) = arival rate * avg. wait time.
Cycle time = WIP / Throughput

Lead time vs Cycle time
Ticket created	Start work	Ticket implemented
Lead time
	Cycle time

Personal Kanban

Visualize work
Limit WIP
Book reference: Personal Kanban

Personal Kanban getting started

Gather materials (sticky notes, whiteboard, pens)
Establish Value stream (Ready/Doing/Done)
Make your backlog explicit (put them on sticky notes, focus on completeness, not organization)
Establish WIP limit
Begin pulling tasks
Reflect

Create a blocked state too – prioritize them and set a WIP on them as well!

Potentially, add a Today column:

Important and Urgent matrix by Dwight Eisenhower
Quadrant of Kaizen – important but not urgent.

Prioritization lanes:

Kanban for software teams

Book Reference: Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

Usually, the upstream process (UP) would produce as fast as they could without worrying about the downstream process (DP) – this lead to a lot of waste = overproduction.

However, in the pull model, the DP requests more parts, and the UP produces just enough items to keep the store populated with some limited number of parts.

The Kanban Method** Properties

Visualize workflow
Limit WIP
Measure and manage flow
Make process policies explicit
Use models to recognize improvement opportunities

Recipe for success

Focus on quality – reduces defects
Reduce WIP – reduces defects as well
Deliver often – as that builds trust
Balance demand against throughput – don’t accept work at a rate higher than the rate your team produces work. This will yield bottlenecks
Prioritize
Attack sources of variability to improve predictability –

Microsoft case study 2004:

remove estimations
limit WIP
More frequent cadence

Implementing Kanban

Define your process and endpoints
Identify types of the workflow
Create a card wall
Establish and visualize queues/buffers

Examples

Example usage for ‘swimlanes’ (horizontal lines denoting ‘critical’ tasks that eventually happen):

An example of post it notes on the actual physical board in case that’s used.

Online Tools

The author mentioned the following tools:

AgileZen
LeanKit
Trello
Targetprocess

However, this list is rather old. Even so much so that at the time Trello was free, and it just got sold yesterday 🙂

I’d like to add one kanban tool that I use for personal usage: https://kanbanflow.com. And one that I’m about to start using, and will write my thoughts about how well is fitting in our workflow after I do some work with it: https://www.blossom.co/.

Conclusion

Very good introduction to Kanban, which may be just as much as you’ll ever need.

My notes from Kanban Fundamentals course on Pluralsight https://t.co/tOQ0Nen0nY

— Nikola Brežnjak (@HitmanHR) January 11, 2017