What You Should Know About Kanban (Part 3)

Don is an entrepreneur and business leader with over 15 years experience specializing in aligning management-driven technologies and initiatives together with business and project strategies resulting in thoroughly planned and comprehensive business solutions. His expertise as a project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, consultant, and business owner has spanned across diverse industries such as finance, retail, health care and information technology

  Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Manufacturing   Quality   Testing/Test Management  

In Part 2 of this series, we looked at the evolution of Kanban from its manufacturing roots in the automobile industry to its current widespread use in software development. As mentioned in that article, this illustrates the evolution from an industrial manufacturing-driven economy to the one driven by knowledge-based technology that we currently live in--and why tools such as Kanban evolve along with it.

We looked at how Kanban is used for agile software development as the tool for managing a Lean approach. Kanban was chosen due to its simplicity, productivity, predictability and visualizations that allow those who use it to increase customer satisfaction and reduce delivery times. But if it works well on specific software projects, can it be scaled to facilitate Lean throughout an organization? This article will look at how Kanban can be thought of as a general purpose change management approach for your organization.

Is Kanban a framework?
With this month’s theme revolving around methods and frameworks for managing projects, it’s a prescient topic for our discussion. This is especially the case when you consider that we are discussing taking Kanban’s use for specific projects and scaling it to how a whole organization manages projects. Inevitably the questions will come up on what the “framework” of Kanban is. But is Kanban a …

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