What Kanban Can Do For You

  Agile   Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Kanban is designed to help your processes, not define them. Along the way, it can provide enormous value to projects and teams, including improved focus, efficiency, communication, prioritization and visibility. Here is an overview of these benefits and tips for realizing them as you implement Kanban into your project work.

Kanban is a process control system that originated about 50 years ago at Toyota (see Related Readings: “Enter Kanban” and “Small Project Kaban”). Although it was originally designed for use in manufacturing, today it is appliedin a wide range of industries. Kanban has proven to be so adaptable that it can be used on any software development project you work on — regardless of the size of the team.

For starters, Kanban uses a board to visualize and manage both the Kanban process and the overall project. A large board is recommended to provide enough room to manage all activitiesand to be visible from a distance. A typical size can be as large as 10 feet long.

Kanban is designed to help manage your process, not define it, so the first step in getting started with Kanban is to translate existing processes into “queues,”each representing a stage of the work. For this scenario, we’ll use these fairly common software development processes: design, code, code review, quality acceptance, design review, demo…

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