The Kanban Board is not
only a central artefact of the Kanban system used in lean and Just in Time, or JIT, production (and Agile software
development), but quite literally drives the operational management system. The
word Kanban is the Japanese term for a signal, which is
why Kanban cards are signals used to alert team’s , an item or service when a change in the workflow occurs. The Kanban board is centrally located in a
visible location to a team of people who are working in tandem to deliver
timely products or services to internal/external customers.
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| Kanban Board |
Kanban is a system where
the flow of work is measured and known to everyone all the time. This reduces
the time lags relative to more conventional, or more
established, management methodologies. It was developed by Toyota as early as
the 1950s, when they took inspiration from the way supermarkets handle the sale
of groceries. Customers generally only buy in smaller quantities, i.e. what
they need in the short term, and the supermarket determines its stock levels by
what it is selling. Toyota went on to apply the paradigm to its manufacturing
in general, where one process could play the role of customer and the process
that precedes it the role of supermarket. This metaphorical supermarket in the
manufacturing environment would use visible signboards so signal the
availability of its ‘end’ product to the ‘customer’, the next process that uses that product as a
starting point. This type of communication driven system dramatically reduces
the very often unnecessary costs of keeping large amounts of inventory throughout
the production process.
This Kanban philosophy was
adopted, quite early, by the software development industry. Software
development is often plagued by mismatches between planning and production,
where market requirements change right as the process
of developing a computer software program is midway through its software
development life cycle, or SDLC. So instead of overloading workers with one giant ‘push’ style
of task management in a big bang approach, development team members ‘pull’ tasks
(called ‘stories’ in Agile/lean) from a centrally visible queue
of work called the backlog. In this
environment, such a Kanban board can be digital to include remote teams. The
work is divided into columns, or workflows, and rows are created as swim lanes. New
tasks are placed in the first workflow lane, and are considered to be in queue.
It is the responsibility of one team, who when finished, marks the card as complete, and/or places the card into the backlog
queue of the next lane, making it available
for the next team in the process to pull into their process lane.
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| Digital Kanban Board |
Because this card signaling
system is easy to learn and understand, yet powerful enough to regulate complex
workflows, Kanban has become much more widespread in its application, and is
used across a great many industries, including health care, business management
and finance. Teams, use the Kanban board to organize their daily to do lists
and other tasks to reduce the challenge of intermediate hand offs being lost or
delayed. Moreover, the use of cloud-based collaboration solutions which
incorporate Kanban allow geographically dispersed teams to easily coordinate
the flow of work while sharing a virtual Kanban boards and signaling each other
via mobile devices.
The Kanban way of life is
spreading well outside of production, and niche industries like software
development.
Kanban methodology is now
penetrating health care, construction, finance and the oil and gas
industries. That’s
because all these industries have repetitive workflows that need to be
optimized to reduce waste and improve the economic benefit. Take a look around your business and consider
if a visual Kanban board can improve your team’s
workflow.
