Kanban Myths and Facts Quiz

Kanban is focused on the flow of work and delivering value to the customers. Increased throughput is a "side effect".

Kanban works for all professional services, which are organizations that produce work that is NOT a physical item. The delivered work might be digital or it might be a service. Organizations using Kanban include: education, legal, sales, marketing, HR, design, media, film production, military, customer support, financial, research, insurance, government agencies, and many more.

As a general rule, seek to make that which is invisible, visible. Once invisible work, workflows, and business risks can be seen, it is possible to manage them better. Understand how to define and capture requests for work. Visualize each request with a card on a Kanban board. Visualize the sequence of knowledge discovery activities performed from when the request is first received until it is completed and ready for delivery to the customer. We call this sequence of knowledge discovery activities, the workflow.

Although Kanban may seem very dehumanized by focusing on the process and not people, this principle makes it even more human-centric: in Kanban, we give people space by removing the burden of constant focus on their actions, sometimes the burden of micromanagement and finger-pointing. Self-organization requires some level of taking initiative or even acts of leadership and in that sense, it is very closely related to the Change Management Principle: Encourage acts of leadership at all levels.

Demand, the request to do work, can be managed! We call this “shaping demand.” There are several methods we teach to improve how work requests are handled. We also have ways of reducing delay and other factors that eat into productivity. The Kanban Method specifically addresses the challenges of professional services work including the high variation environment of technology businesses.

The Kanban Method is designed to be expanded and extended. Kanban enthusiasts and thought leaders worldwide have developed new techniques that have resulted in a vast body of knowledge. Kanban approaches now cover topics like product validation, portfolio management, depth charting, capacity allocation, motivational models and much more. Kanban is continually modified and extended in collaboration with the broad Kanban community.

Kanban is a non-disruptive method for managing evolutionary change. Fundamental to the method is the ability to make incremental changes starting with what you are doing now. Making smaller incremental changes protects the overall system from risk and ensures improvements are actually being made by analyzing the results in isolation with each change. It also gives the possibility to easily rollback to where an organization was without any additional cost or disruption that is inherent in other change methods.

Without leadership to catalyze change things will not improve. Information about where improvements are possible can appear at any level in an organization and most often at the individual contributor level. If changes are to be made quickly and effectively individuals who believe improvement is possible must feel empowered to enact it. A culture of safety must exist, to take action without fear of retribution providing changes can be defended based on logical explanation using models and data.

Using the Kanban method means applying a holistic way of thinking about your services with a focus on improving them from your customers’ perspective.

With Kanban, you and your business will develop an adaptive capability over time to respond better and faster to changes in your customers’ needs and expectations or within your business environment.

Kanban is big on measurement, validation, and facts about actual performance. The Kanban Method incorporates the scientific method. When a problem or deficiency is detected, an experiment can be tried through a deliberate process. Most importantly, with Kanban we acknowledge the current reality (including problems) without finger-pointing and instead focus on how the entire system can improve.

Large organizations are using Kanban with thousands of employees, enterprise wide, including many remote offices. Kanban University offers a roadmap for improving enterprise agility based on the Kanban Maturity Model. Unlike early agile methods Kanban does not require teams to be co-located it is focused on connecting organisational services rather than teams.