July 9th, 2024 by Thea Maisuradze
Kanban methodology is an incredibly effective way to improve planning, efficiency, collaboration, quality, and more. Today, we’ll explore the key benefits that make Kanban so useful, as well as the core principles that guide its success.
Benefits of Kanban: Why Use It?
Although kanban systems emerged from the automotive space, it’s equally important in software product development and management. There are a variety of advantages it provides that have led to its popularity in this space, such as:
- Planning Flexibility
- Shortened Time Cycles
- Fewer Bottlenecks
- Increased Visibility of Flow
- Continuous Delivery
- Improved Predictability
- Better Dependencies Management
- Increased Customer Satisfaction
1. Planning Flexibility
For many companies, striving for business agility is driven by the need for flexibility. With no prescribed phase durations (unlike other Agile methodologies, such as Scrum), features are released as soon as they are completed. Kanban, therefore, supports the “release on demand” considerations — even in scaled agile implementations. By using a kanban roadmap rather than relying on a rigid general project plan, product managers are free to reassess immediate priorities based on changes in the market. Kanban methodology suggests an approach to backlog management that helps teams become more self-managing while bringing transparency and consistency to the decision-making process.
2. Shortened Time Cycles
Reducing WIP with limits in each column/swimlane helps team members finish what they’re doing before moving on to new things and sends a message to the customer and other stakeholders that there is limited capacity. In practice, this method was found to reduce cycle times, or the time taken to complete a task on average, improving timeline efficiencies.
3. Fewer Bottlenecks
Kanban paved the foundation for how value can be maximized in a process by limiting project scope to fit a schedule. By controlling the flow for specific process steps that have high contention for resources (such as software integration testing), kanban avoids bottlenecks at key processes in the software development lifecycle.
4. Increased Visibility (of Flow)
The “visualize flow of work” concept of kanban focuses on transparency in the process by which work items will be formally recognized. The use of a backlog with full transparency of work item flow coincided with the “definition of ready” and “definition of done” to pick an item to enter or exit the workflow queue. Kanban helps facilitate a clear definition of the queue itself because of this, increasing the visibility of flow in the entire software development lifecycle.
5. Continuous Delivery
The goal of continuous delivery is to rapidly, reliably, and repeatedly deliver new features and bug fixes at low risk and with minimal overhead. The goal of kanban is to optimize the flow of work through incremental change. Both approaches share the common objective of delivering value to the customer faster. Kanban and continuous delivery also complement each other with their shared objective of process improvement. Continuous delivery, which can be delayed by manual effort and human error, often uses automation to make processes more efficient.
6. Improved Predictability
According to Little’s Law, the number of customers stationary in the system (WIP) is the product of the long-term effective arrival rate (throughput) and the time the customer spends in the system (lead time). Implementing WIP limits and ensuring the Little’s Law assumptions are met keeps your process operating as a stable system. A stable system is a predictable system and one that enables you to make data-driven decisions. Most importantly, kanban doesn’t require you to revamp your process to begin seeing these benefits. It works by implementing incremental, evolutionary changes to make your workflow more efficient and your team more productive.
7. Better Dependencies Management
In any software project, there are dependencies on work items. Kanban offered support in these areas by looking at impediments to flow! Whether it is an overworked process, undocumented procedure, untrained people, or a poorly calibrated system, kanban uses the combination of managing the flow and continuous learning to relentlessly avoid anything that contributes to any type of waste.
8. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Kanban cycle time is calculating the actual work-in-progress time. It tracks how long a task stays in the different process stages. Keeping track of your cycle times enables you to measure your team’s performance. Low cycle times mean that your team is efficient. High cycle times indicate stalls, bottlenecks, and backlogs. Keeping cycle times down keeps lead time down and customer satisfaction high. Because of this, a side benefit of the reduced cycle times is improved overall customer satisfaction.
Kanban Practices & Principles
In essence, kanban is a scheduling system for lean and other Just-in-Time (JIT) processes, allowing organizations to start with their existing workflow and drive evolutionary change.
The core philosophy behind kanban advocates transparency of the work that is in process. “This lean philosophy is the foundation for the kanban principles behind the essential kanban practices of maintaining flow, eliminating waste, and improving continuous learning,” says our Agile Evangelist, Dr. Sriram Rajagopalan. Here are the guiding practices of kanban systems:
- Visualize the flow of work
- Limit Work in Progress
- Manage Flow
- Make Process Policies Explicit
- Implement Feedback Loops
- Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally
1. Visualize the flow of work
We’ve all heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Similarly, the visualization of work and the workflow allows individuals and teams to observe risks or hurdles across the project, which may manifest as blockers, queues, impediments, or bottlenecks. Visualizing the flow of work (the number of cards in each lane) in the workflows (the stages in the swimlane) as indicated in the diagram below, allows everyone in the project delivery team and product organization to preemptively address risks to ensure “flow.”
2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)
Although many think multitasking is essential, the concept of leaving one task incomplete to pick another task introduces the possibility of no work being completed in the end. Additional time is also spent on context switching and understanding where the earlier tasks were left. Lean highlights that balancing multiple tasks simultaneously causes less productivity due to the waiting times introduced and recommends limiting the work in progress to gain focused attention on the work at hand.
Frequently, when too much WIP exists, there is a larger overhead to lengthy queues. Sometimes, people think of these WIP limits as a visual checklist. On the other hand, kanban is not a to-do list but puts limits on the work in process to avoid waiting times and resource bottlenecks. In the diagram above, you can see a WIP limit applied on the “In Progress” column that visually indicates exceeding capacity. The focus, therefore, shifts from managing many things and finishing fewer things to focusing on a few things and completing them fully.
3. Manage Flow
Once the work is visualized on what delivers value and WIP limits are set to reduce the adverse effects of task switching, the team can focus on optimizing flow. All the items in the kanban board are part of the systems thinking approach to move unprocessed items on the left to completed items on the right. The goal here is to observe where work gets stuck and get them unstuck. For example, this could be the result of a lack of training on the processes and tools or limited collaboration among team members. These learnings come from daily meetings, lessons learned, retrospective sessions, or review sessions.
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
As the organization identifies opportunities to improve the system, this knowledge is written into the Kanban framework itself. Doing so allows us to capture and preserve organizational learning by building it into the system we use to manage our work — the kanban board. There are many ways to modify a Kanban board to make process policies explicit. One is to redesign the board to specify how the workflows. Another is to use WIP limits to explicitly state our policy about how much WIP we are able to take on.
5. Implement Feedback Loops
While managing the flow, lessons are learned. Kanban emphasizes how work flows through the value stream so teams can continuously improve — this ongoing improvement is the basis of Kaizen. You can think of these improvements in terms of lagging indicators like the number of risks impacting flow, WIP limits, and lead time. Because of this, retrospective discussions may focus on the number of cards blocked, the total number of blocked days, the number of cards completed per week, and the various areas that block cards.
6. Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally
Kanban also promotes qualitative learning, such as the exploratory and experimental approaches to innovations attempted. These innovations may be radical and are called Kaikaku. For example, this new knowledge gained from radical innovations may lead to the development of a new product or promote a better understanding of the processes for faster implementation of feedback loops. It could also aid the cross-functional team knowledge for capacity, transition, and succession planning to foster team cohesion to collaborate on business value.
Take Advantage of the Benefits of Kanban
If you’re ready to maximize the benefits and value you get from kanban development, SpiraTeam and Rapise can help you. They offer powerful capabilities to visualize, manage, and automate your projects, increasing efficiency, reducing bugs and issues, and organizing everything you need in one place. Get started with a free 30-day trial by clicking here!