Operations and Supply Chain ManagementProject Management
Title: Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business
Author: David J. Anderson
Publication Year: 2010
Category: Project Management
Executive Summary
David J. Anderson’s Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business presents a pragmatic approach to managing and improving the delivery of products and services. The book articulates how Kanban can be used to achieve evolutionary change—a concept that focuses on making gradual, continuous improvements rather than disruptive, large-scale overhauls. This summary extracts the most crucial points of the book, supplemented with concrete examples and specific actions that a person can take to implement the advice in their own projects or organizations.
Introduction to Kanban
Key Point: Kanban is a visual approach for managing work as it moves through a process, enabling teams to visualize their work, restrict work-in-progress (WIP), and optimize the flow of tasks.
Action: Start by creating a Kanban board with columns representing different stages of your workflow (e.g., To Do, In Progress, Done). This can be done on a physical board or via digital tools like Trello or Jira.
Example: The book recounts the experience of a software development team using a physical Kanban board. They had columns marked “Backlog,” “Development,” “Testing,” and “Deployment,” which helped them see bottlenecks emerging in the testing phase.
Principles of Kanban
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Start With What You Do Now
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Key Point: Unlike other project management methods that require a drastic overhaul, Kanban starts with the existing process and seeks to incrementally improve it.
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Action: Map your current process. Identify the steps your team is already taking and put them on the Kanban board.
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Example: Anderson describes a manufacturing company that begins by simply mapping its current workflow onto a Kanban board, making it easier for everyone to grasp the present dynamics and consider improvements.
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Agree to Pursue Incremental, Evolutionary Change
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Key Point: Commit to continuous improvement rather than seeking immediate, large-scale changes.
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Action: Implement small changes regularly and review their impact. Use retrospectives to discuss what is working and what isn’t.
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Example: A tech startup held weekly retrospectives to assess their Kanban board usage. Over time, they saw significant improvements in task completion times and team morale.
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Respect the Current Process, Roles, Responsibilities & Titles
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Key Point: Before making suggestions for changes, understand and respect the current roles and responsibilities in place.
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Action: Hold discussions with team members to understand their frustrations and suggestions, ensuring that proposed changes are socially acceptable.
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Example: A team member in a customer support department was initially resistant to change. By involving him in the discussion and respecting his role, the team could collectively tweak their process without causing friction.
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Encourage Acts of Leadership at Every Level
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Key Point: Leadership should not be limited to management. Encourage all team members to contribute to improving the process.
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Action: Create a culture where every team member feels empowered to suggest and lead changes.
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Example: In a software team, a junior developer suggested an integration tool that significantly sped up deployment times. The suggestion was implemented, leading to noticeable efficiency improvements.
Practices to Implement
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Visualize the Workflow
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Key Point: Making work visible helps teams understand where tasks are getting stuck and what’s coming down the pipeline.
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Action: Use different colored cards for different types of tasks (e.g., feature development, bug fixes). Place them on the Kanban board in the corresponding columns.
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Example: A marketing team used color-coded sticky notes to represent tasks like social media posts, blog articles, and email campaigns. This made it easy to see workload distribution and identify where resources were needed.
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Limit Work-in-Progress (WIP)
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Key Point: By restricting the number of tasks that can be in progress simultaneously, teams can focus better and reduce multi-tasking inefficiencies.
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Action: Set WIP limits for each column on your Kanban board. Start with a limit and adjust based on your team’s capacity and performance.
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Example: A creative agency set a WIP limit of three tasks per team member. This limit made the team more focused and reduced the time taken to complete individual tasks.
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Manage Flow
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Key Point: The goal is to improve the predictability and smoothness of the process.
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Action: Monitor the flow of tasks through your columns. Identify stages where tasks frequently get delayed and brainstorm ways to address these bottlenecks.
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Example: A game development team observed that tasks often stalled in the testing phase. By adding more resources to testing or refining testing scripts, they managed to speed up the entire workflow.
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Make Process Policies Explicit
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Key Point: Clearly defined and communicated policies reduce misunderstandings and ensure everyone is on the same page.
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Action: Document process policies and display them near the Kanban board. Make sure each policy is agreed upon by the team.
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Example: A software company documented their policy that no task could move from the “In Progress” to the “Done” column without code review and testing. This clarified expectations and reduced errors.
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Implement Feedback Loops
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Key Point: Feedback loops such as regular stand-up meetings, retrospectives, and reviews ensure continuous improvement.
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Action: Schedule regular feedback sessions. Use these sessions to discuss what is working, what isn’t, and what adjustments might be needed.
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Example: An IT support team conducted daily stand-ups and bi-weekly retrospectives. These sessions helped them quickly identify issues and implement swift solutions.
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Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally
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Key Point: Evolutionary change is driven by small, manageable experiments guided by a scientific approach to problem-solving.
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Action: Encourage the team to propose small, testable changes. Implement these changes, monitor results, and decide whether to make them permanent.
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Example: A product development team experimented with a new prioritization method for incoming tasks. They tracked the results over a quarter and found it increased productivity, thereby making it a standard procedure.
Benefits and Common Pitfalls
Benefits:
- Increased Visibility: Allows everyone to see the state and flow of tasks, making coordination simpler.
- Example: Teams can see bottlenecks at a glance and resolve them more quickly.
- Better Efficiency: Limiting WIP and focusing on flow reduces context-switching and inefficiencies.
- Example: Reducing WIP limits helped a team cut their average task completion time by 30%.
- Continuous Improvement: Small, incremental changes lead to long-term improvements.
- Example: Regular feedback loops led to steady, noticeable improvements in a company’s product quality over a year.
Common Pitfalls:
- Ignoring Bottlenecks
- Key Point: Bottlenecks can seriously impede progress.
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Action: Regularly monitor your workflow and act swiftly to address bottlenecks as they arise.
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Lack of Commitment to WIP Limits
- Key Point: Exceeding WIP limits negates their benefits.
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Action: Strictly enforce WIP limits. Regularly review and adjust them as needed to optimize flow.
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Insufficient Buy-in from Team Members
- Key Point: Without team commitment, the Kanban system will struggle to be effective.
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Action: Involve the team in setting up and optimizing the Kanban system. Make sure they see the value it brings.
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Failing to Make Process Policies Clear
- Key Point: Ambiguity leads to misunderstandings and errors.
- Action: Clearly define and communicate all process policies. Regularly review and update them.
Conclusion
David J. Anderson’s Kanban provides a critically acclaimed, actionable framework for managing workflow and implementing incremental improvements. By making work visible, limiting WIP, managing flow, making policies explicit, and encouraging feedback and collaborative improvement, teams can significantly enhance productivity and efficiency. The concrete examples and action steps provided illustrate how this methodology can be feasibly applied to various contexts, from software development to marketing, making it a versatile tool in the project management arsenal.