At the recent ASQ Charlotte Section Annual Conference 2013, Quality Conference of the Carolinas, I was facilitated a breakout session on “Team Kanban”. I created this mind map for an outline which I share below.
I have been around Kanban for a while. Both David Anderson and Jim Benson are regular visitors to the podcast along with around a dozen others who have participated in the Kanban theme. Kanban’s simplicity is what makes it so attractive. When you think of the two basic rules that Jim states in the Persona Kanban book. Limit Work in Process and Make Work Visible, it sounds to simple. However, these philosophies force us to understand our work. That is the basic tenant of Kanban. When we get in a team environment, the transparency of Kanban makes everyone accept the current way they do work. I find many people and organizations struggle with this.
It is the basic philosophy of the Lean Practice of Standard Work. Once we understand how we do our work and how much work we can accomplish it sets a standard. Many people in the Kanban world shy away from the words Standard Work, and they will use terms like “making policies explicit” but the premise is still the same. Setting this standard is the key to improvement.
As we have all come to understand from the words of Taiichi Ohno:
“Without a Standard, there can be no improvement.”
P.S. A recent InfoQ blog post, Implementing Kanban in Practice with Dr. Arne Roock, author of a 30 page book on Kanban, Stop Starting, Start Finishing! . I thought the article and book were quite insightful.