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“The purpose of kanban is to eliminate the kanban”

I found the quote that title’s this blog post in Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata book – the origin is simply stated as “a Toyota person”. Kanban: We’re Doing It Wrong The title quote plays hand in hand with a quote from The Toyota Way : “kanban is something...

Published Sat, Jan 01 2010 11:49 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Management, Kanban, Kaizen

Electronic Kanban Tools and WIP Limits: LeanKitKanban and AgileZen Get It!

Most of the electronic Kanban boards that exist simply don’t understand what WIP limits are really about. They all seem to go down the path of forcing any step (column) in the process to have a maximum limit that is very hard and fast. They set it up...

Published Mon, Nov 11 2009 12:55 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Management, Kanban, Metrics, Tools and Vendors

A Failed Opportunity To Coach, Teach, And Help Others Improve

A colleague in the nation of Pablo-The-Donkey asked a question on the LosTechies private mailing list: “Has anyone had experience with bringing agile into a workplace that has legacy code that hurts to touch, let alone wrap tests around and refactor?...

Published Thu, Sep 09 2009 5:09 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Education, Coaching

A Kanban Board Is A Production Leveling Task Board

In the lean manufacturing world heijunka - production leveling - “ is a technique for reducing the mura waste and vital to the development of production efficiency […]. The general idea is to produce intermediate goods at a constant rate, to allow further...

Published Wed, Sep 09 2009 8:50 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Workflow

Kanban In Time-Boxes: The Cadence of WIP and Sprints

A comment that was left on a previous post , and a response that I made to the comment, got me thinking about Kanban and time boxes such as Sprints or Iterations some more. As I stated in my response, I don’t think time boxes are “not Lean”, at this point...

Published Fri, Aug 08 2009 5:02 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Workflow, Productivity, Metrics

A Response to 5 Right Reasons to Apply Kanban

Michael Dubakov has a couple of great posts over at TargetProcess on 5 Wrong Reasons To Apply Kanban and 5 Reasons To Apply Kanban . I started to post this as a comment in response to his 5 Reasons To Apply Kanban, but the size of the comment got a little...

Published Wed, Aug 08 2009 10:56 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Management, Kanban, Quality, Workflow, Theory Of Constraints, Productivity, Metrics

How To Get Started With Kanban In Software Development

There’s a lot of great talk around the inter-weber-net-o-sphere on why Kanban works in software development, how to do specific details of Kanban, how to effectively talk about it, and other such subjects. If you’re interested in a great set of resources...

Published Wed, Aug 08 2009 5:41 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Quality, Throughput, Workflow, Productivity

Daycare As A Kanban System

I was discussing my two year old son’s daycare with my wife, yesterday, when it dawned on me that the daycare itself can be viewed as a Kanban system. A Kanban system is a system level process control system that limits the work in process (WIP), authorizes...

Published Tue, Aug 08 2009 10:34 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Management, Kanban, Throughput, Workflow

Kanban Is Process Control, Not A Process For Adding Value To WIP

There’s some very interesting conversation on Chris McMahon’s blog titled “ against kanban ”. In general, I don’t agree with what he is saying. I think that he is largely basing his current opinion on some misguided “expert” opinions rather than doing...

Published Mon, Jul 07 2009 11:06 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 3: Andon and Jidoka - Handling Bugs and Emergency Fixes in Kanban

Let's assume that we are doing the appropriate amount of testing during our development process. If we include TDD, test automation, test engineers and customer acceptance testing, we should find the majority of the bugs in our system before they...

Published Fri, Dec 12 2008 8:46 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Community, Analysis and Design, Principles and Patterns, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems, Continuous Integration, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 2.5: A Variation on Queues - Pipelines for WIP and Done

In part 2 of my Kanban in Software Development series, I talked about completing a kanban board with queues, order points and limits. We saw how to take a complete development pipeline and work with a team, its processes and its bottlenecks. In the end...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 12:07 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Analysis and Design, Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 2: Completing the Kanban Board with Queues, Order Points and Limits

In Part 1 of Kanban in Software Development , I introduced the concepts of kanban boards and pipelines. I also showed a very simple example of creating a pipeline for our development process. However, there were some obvious limitations in what I showed...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 2:06 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Philosophy of Software, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 1: Introducing Kanban Boards and Pipelines

In the world of Scrum , XP and other forms of Agile software development , many teams use visual control systems to outline the various steps that software goes through during development. These boards are known by various names - Scrum boards, card-boards...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 10:45 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Kanban - Pulling Value From The Supplier

Before I start talking about how our team is going about our implementations of Lean and Kanban, I wanted to start by outlining my current understanding of what kanban is. I'm hoping that this will set the ground work for the rest of my Adventures...

Published Thu, Nov 11 2008 4:03 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

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