TABLE OF CONTENTS

3 Foreword

4 How to Use This Guide

5 Introduction

7 Step 1: Map Your Current Workflow

10 Step 2: Put Work on the Board

13 Step 3: Gather ‘Round the Board

18 Step 4: Limit Your Work in Process

21 Step 5: Measure and Learn

25 Conclusion
9
er
26 Resources

27 Key Terms

2
FOREWORD
By 2008, my team and I had learned enough about the benefits of
Kanban to be fascinated by the possibilities. Smoother workflow.
Less waste. Higher productivity. Data to measure and improve. Just
considering Kanban brought us more energy.

On day one, though, we hit our first hurdle. As veterans of

prescriptive work methodologies, we were used to externally
imposed ways of doing things. By nature, Kanban is not
prescriptive. It starts with visualizing the work your team is doing
right now. But, like many people, articulating that effectively didn’t Chris Hefley, CEO and
come naturally to us. Co-founder of LeanKit, is
a practitioner and thought
In the years since, I’ve seen that pattern over and over again. leader in the global Lean/
Kanban community. In
Teams have followed prescriptive rules for so long that they’re
2011, he was nominated for
often puzzled by the freedom of Kanban and don’t know where to the Lean Systems Society’s
start. Brickell Key Award.

After years of coping

The exercises and suggestions in this book are designed to provide with “broken” project
that help. Many are already in use by Kanban coaches around management systems
the world, and most are not things that we came up with at in the world of software
LeanKit. These are simple but powerful aids to thinking about your development, Chris helped
current work and understanding where queues are found, where build LeanKit as a way
for teams to become more
bottlenecks may form and where work-in-process (WIP) limits can
effective.
increase productivity.
Prior to LeanKit, Chris
worked with globally
I hope you’ll find these exercises and suggestions helpful as your
distributed teams in
team begins its journey of continuous improvement through
leadership positions at HCA
Kanban. Healthcare and IMI Health.
He believes in building
Best, software and systems
that make people’s lives
better and transform their
relationship with work.

Chris Hefley
CEO, LeanKit

3
HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

Each step in the Kanban Roadmap Timing: Manage

Your Expectations
comprises these elements.
Kanban is less about
finding the perfect
CORE KANBAN process and more about
The Kanban principle and concepts upon which the step is based. continuously improving
your process.

LET’S GO It can take as few as six

A group activity to make each step an interactive, team-based weeks to more like two or
journey (includes a materials list, time involved, instructions and a three months to complete
real-world example). these exercises with your
team. During the first
month, you’ll spend the
majority of your time
observing how your newly
visualized process shakes
Observation Point: What team leaders need to be on the
out and solidifies. The
lookout for during team exercises.
next month or two will be
more about continuous
improvement, which
can (and will) repeat
Helpful Tips: Extra guidance for the team.
indefinitely.

The Bottomline: The main point. TIP: Teams that are already
practicing Agile can include
these exercises in their two-
week sprints.

KANBAN BOARD EXAMPLES

to do DOING Done We include sample

boards and cards
throught this guide.
They’re not the only
way of doing things.
We encourage your
team to make them
your own.

In this guide, the following terms are interchangeable:

• board/whiteboard
• lane/a column on the board/a step in your process
• card/sticky note/work item

4
INTRODUCTION

A (very) Short History of Kanban

and How It Works

In the late 1940s, Toyota found a better engineering process from

an unlikely source: the supermarket. They noticed that store clerks
restocked a grocery item by their store’s inventory, not their
vendor’s supply.

Only when an item was near sellout did the clerks order more. The
grocers’ “just-in-time” delivery process sparked Toyota engineers
to rethink their methods and pioneer a new approach—a Kanban
system—that would match inventory with demand and achieve
higher levels of quality and throughput.

So how’d they do all that?

In simplest terms, by better communication through visual

management.

Kanban is Japanese for “visual signal” or “card.” Toyota

line-workers used a kanban (i.e., an actual card) to signal steps
in their manufacturing process. The system’s highly visual nature
allowed teams to communicate more easily on what work needed
to be done and when. It also standardized cues and refined
processes, which helped to reduce waste and maximize value.

A new application of Kanban emerged for knowledge work as early

as 2005, and an inquisitive community formed in 2007 around the
leadership of David Anderson, Jim Benson, Corey Ladas and others.
Their resulting body of knowledge was influenced not only by the
Toyota Production System but also by the work of W. Edwards
Deming, Eliyahu Goldratt, Donald Reinertsen and other thought
leaders.

Next: Learn the Kanban core principles.

5
 INTRODUCTION
Kanban is now gaining traction as a way to smoothly implement
Agile and Lean management methods in tech and non-tech
companies around the world. Throughout this fresh take, Kanban’s
core elements have remained rooted in the following four
principles:

1. Visualize Work

By creating a visual model of your work and workflow, you can

observe the flow of work moving through your Kanban system.
Making the work visible—along with blockers, bottlenecks
and queues—instantly leads to increased communication and
collaboration.

2. Limit Work in Process

By limiting how much unfinished work is in process, you can reduce

the time it takes an item to travel through the Kanban system. You
can also avoid problems caused by task switching and reduce the
need to constantly reprioritize items.

3. Focus on Flow

By using work-in-process limits and developing team-driven

policies, you can optimize your Kanban system to improve the
smooth flow of work, collect metrics to analyze flow, and even get
leading indicators of future problems by analyzing the flow of work.

4. Continuous Improvement

Once your Kanban system is in place, it becomes the cornerstone

for a culture of continuous improvement. Teams measure their
effectiveness by tracking flow, quality, throughput, lead times and
more. Experiments and analysis can change the system to improve
the team’s effectiveness.

Note: There are many ways to define Kanban. Our intent in listing the core
elements in this manner is not to introduce a new definition but to distill the
common principles.

First up: Learn how to visualize your work.

6
STEP ONE | MAP YOUR CURRENT WORKFLOW

CORE KANBAN OBSERVATION

POINT
It’s common for team
Visualize your workflow. members to debate how
the process works and
Unlike other methods that force fit change from the get-go, not come to an immediate
Kanban is about evolution, not revolution. It hinges on the consensus. See how each
fundamental truth that you can’t get where you want to go without person works and thinks.
Different personalities
first knowing where you are.
may show preference
for more or less rigidity.
Your first exercise will help you define your team’s workflow and Talk through each reason.
show you how to map the process on a whiteboard. Do this not Encourage transparency,
only with your team but also as a team. respect and perspective.

Every team has a process for completing its work, even if the
workflow is as simple as to do, doing, done.

LET’S GO
YOU WILL NEED
Your team, in a room, around a whiteboard. Dry-erase markers. A
pen/pencil and at least five sticky notes for each team member.

TIME
Block out at least an hour. You might need more time, depending
on the size of your team and the number of your team’s external
touchpoints. Don’t shortchange this part of the process. The
workflow mapping exercise will encapsulate all of the politics of the
group. Many high-value conversations will happen while your team
is mapping out its process.

7
 STEP ONE | MAP YOUR CURRENT WORKFLOW

ACTIVITY HELPFUL TIPS

1. Each team member writes down the top three to five things Resist the urge to redesign
that he or she has in process, using one sticky note per work your process.

item. Be granular rather than sky level. “Building the week Notice specific places in
view of the new calendar feature” is better than simply writing your process where the
“Calendar” on your sticky note. Specifics help the whole team work isn’t really under
understand the details of each work item. your control. Maybe it’s
waiting on approval from
someone outside the team,
2. Each team member picks a sticky note from their selection of or a piece of work is in
current work items, sticks it to his or her shirt and “becomes” process somewhere else.
that piece of work.
Recognize where there are
queues in your process
3. Figure out where your piece of work is in your team’s process and/or where work sits
by asking the following three questions: Where am I right now? and waits between steps.
Where did I come from? Where will I go next? Include these as steps in
your workflow.

4. Make sure you’ve taken into account not only the work of your
team members but also how work flows into the team from
leaders, customers and other parts of the organization.

Remember, there’s no right or wrong process. There’s only your

team’s process, as simple or as complex as it may be, at this very
moment.

8
 EXAMPLE
Let’s say you’re on a development team, and your individual work item is “Building the week view of the
new calendar feature.”

Where are you Where did you Where will you

right now? come from? go next?
In Development. Planning. Test.

The answers are the steps in your process. Using the example above, we’ve defined three chronological
steps by analyzing just one piece of work:

Planning > In Development > Test

Use each teammate’s answers to define more steps and/or validate the steps you’ve already identified.
In the end, you might come up with a process like this:

Plan > Develop > Test > Deploy > Done

Now go to the whiteboard, divide it into columns and/or rows, and BOTTOMLINE
write the title of each step in your workflow at the top of a column,
Be honest about your
leaving a bit of whiteboard on each side for a “To Do” lane and a
workflow. This first step is
“Done” lane, if they’re not already in your process. all about taking a snapshot
of how your team works
Keep your process on the whiteboard for the next exercises. You’ll so you can improve the big
picture later.
keep building on it.

Next Step: Put your work on the board.

9
 STEP TWO | PUT WORK ON THE BOARD

CORE KANBAN OBSERVATION

POINT
Kanban is about teams
Visualize your work. working towards a shared
goal. When putting
Today’s workforce may be armed with retina-worthy smartphones work on the board,
and tablets, but plenty of information still comes our way as words avoid dividing work by
on a screen. Emails, spreadsheets, task lists—text is everywhere. the person responsible.
Instead, group work items
While it fits certain scenarios, textual information is not a one-size-
together by project, type
fits-all communication vehicle. Its effectiveness is lower than you of work or other process-
might think. based identifier.

It starts with your brain.

A picture is worth a thousand words for scientific reasons: The

brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text.
Forty percent of all nerve fibers connected to the brain are linked
to the retina. Visual information comprises 90 percent of the data
that comes to our brain, suggesting that our neurological pathways
might even prefer pictorial displays over text.

Kanban helps you harness the power of visual information by using

sticky notes on a whiteboard to create a “picture” of your work.
Seeing how your work flows within your team’s process lets you
not only communicate status but also give and receive context
for the work. Kanban takes information that typically would be
communicated via words and turns it into brain candy.

Visualizing your work is a critical step.

10
LET’S GO HELPFUL TIPS

Although this exercise

YOU WILL NEED correlates card color with
Your team. The whiteboard with your team’s process from exercise type of work, your team
may want to use card color
one. Dry-erase markers. A pen/pencil and sheet of paper for each
to indicate priority, source
team member. A plethora of sticky notes that are several different
of demand or some other
colors. A pack of multicolored, round stickers. A pack of sticky flags theme unique to your work.
or index tabs.
Think about how you will
want to analyze the work
TIME later. By bug? Feature?
Block out an hour. You might use more or less time, depending on Task? This will help you
the size of your team and how much work is currently in process. discern which types of
work are present with your
team.
ACTIVITY
Use the language you
use among your team to
1. Each team member writes down his or her work items on a describe the work.
separate sheet of paper. Allow about five minutes for this task.
Recognize that you may
An informal list is all that’s needed; try not to be too granular.
have different priorities
of work. Instead of high,
2. Post the lists and compare, looking for themes among the medium and low, use
work. Pick one person and analyze his or her list first. For each meaningful descriptions
work item, ask, “What kind of work is this?” (A development of priority that indicate
how you will treat each
team, for example, might have these types of work: feature,
type of work (e.g., expedite,
defect, user story or task.) As your team members identify production break-fix and
different types of work on the first list, they should label their regulatory requirement).
lists accordingly. This part of the exercise continues until a type
of work has been assigned to each work item on every list.

3. Designate a different color of sticky note to each type of work. BOTTOMLINE

(Note: In this guide, the terms “card,” “sticky note” and “work
Do your best to capture all
item” are interchangeable.) of your work in process.
Don’t worry too much
4. Each team member transfers his or her list of work items to about the granularity of
work items at this point.
individual sticky notes of the appropriate color.
You’ll have items of varying
size (i.e., tasks that require
5. Team members post their sticky notes on the whiteboard in more or less time to
the lane that corresponds with the work item’s current status. complete) that will unfold
later.

6. Indicate who’s working on what by writing team member

names on the flags/index tabs. Use round stickers for blockers.

11
 STEP TWO | PUT WORK ON THE BOARD

SAMPLE BOARD & CARD EXAMPLE*

to do plan develop test deploy done

User Story Defect Task Feature

Unique identifier
based on team
standards
Ticket ID #42 Chris
Name of who’s
working on the card

The week view of the new Alex

Activity name
calendar feature
Rough estimate of
size of work in hours
or other metric 3 Red sticker indicates a blocker

*We include sample boards and cards throught this guide. They’re not the only
way of doing things. We encourage your team to make them your own.

Next Step: Gather ‘round the board.

12
STEP THREE | GATHER ‘ROUND THE BOARD

CORE KANBAN OBSERVATION

POINT
Traditional leadership
Focus on flow. often manifests itself in
rank-and-file rules of
Now that your work is on the board, it’s time to start moving it. engagement. As a team
Work items move across the board, from left to right, as progress lead or project manager,
occurs. When a team member is ready to start work on something you may be tempted to
jump in and steer standups
new, he or she pulls a new work item into the appropriate lane on
and retrospectives.
the board. Empower your team
members to see the
Treat the board—and all of the work on the board—as an asset bottlenecks and flow for
that belongs to the entire team, rather than work items that are themselves. The best results
come from engaging the
owned by the manager or individual team members. It’s important
entire team.
to think about the entire board as a single system. It has a purpose
and a capacity, as well as capabilities and interactions. Focus
on managing the flow of work through the system, rather than
directing the work of each team member.

As you look at the board, notice: How does the work flow? Or,
conversely: Where does the work get stuck? The best way to start
observing the flow of work is with routine meetings called daily
standups and weekly retrospectives.

Daily “standups” received their name because teams meet while

standing, rather than sitting, when gathered around a board.
Standing encourages brevity and staying on task.

“Retrospectives” are held on a regular basis (we suggest weekly).

They give the team a focused opportunity to evaluate the health of
the system, make adjustments and devise experiments.

When implemented effectively, standups and retrospectives

are powerful tools for teams that seek transparency and open
collaboration. Without targeted discussion, however, standups can
morph into what’s-on-my-schedule recitations, and retrospectives
can turn into personnel critiques. The next two exercises will help
keep your team focused on the work and the process, while laying
the groundwork for a team culture of continuous improvement.

13
 STEP THREE | GATHER ‘ROUND THE BOARD

LET’S GO HELPFUL TIPS

Try this exercise even

YOU WILL NEED if your team already
Your team, circled around your work on the board. Extra sticky works with standups and
retrospectives. The Kanban
notes, pens and stickers.
format is a bit different
than Scrum’s and offers a
TIME new vantage point.
Block out 30 minutes for each daily standup during the first couple
of weeks. As you become more familiar with the routine, you’ll
optimize the meeting to a maximum of 15 minutes. Block out
an hour for your first few weekly retrospectives. You might use
more or less time, depending on the size of your team, how much
work is currently in process and if you currently hold standups or
retrospectives.

ACTIVITY

How to Hold a Kanban Standup

For optimal efficiency, team members should update the status
of their work items prior to standup, so everyone sees a current
picture of the work in process.

Each day, a different team member leads the discussion. The leader
begins by “walking the board” from right to left—to focus first on
work items that are closest to completion—and asks of those cards,
“What do we need to do to advance this piece of work?”

Always favor finishing something over starting something new.

When the team views the entire system as belonging to them,
then the most important outcome is for the team/system to get
something all the way to “done.” So when the leader asks, “What
do we need to do to complete this piece of work?”, and a person
assigned to the work answers, “I just need a little help today to
push it over the line,” a team that’s working as one system won’t be
short of volunteers.

14
After walking the board, ask the team: HELPFUL TIPS

Q: “Is anyone working on anything that’s not on the board?” When is a work item truly
A: If no, continue to the next question. If yes, pause to let team done? It should mean
that a card will not move
members add work items.
backwards after reaching
“done.” If it does, add a
WHY
verification, policy or
To gain the truest possible understanding of the team’s definition of done to your
workload. process.

Q: “What are we looking to finish, as a team?”

A: Look at business value, encroaching deadlines or your team’s
chosen unit of value to reprioritize or reassign work, as needed.

WHY
To reinforce that all work is the team’s work and to help move
prioritized work over the goalline first.

Q. “Can we spot any bottlenecks or other impediments to the

flow of work?”
A: Look for queues of work, loaded lanes or other indicators of
risks and issues.

WHY
To observe both the upstream and downstream ramifications of
stalled flow and to figure out how to get work flowing again.

During the first month of holding standups, it’s likely that you’ll
notice discrepancies in the granularity of work items. Continue to
divide work into smaller tasks and subtasks, as necessary. Look
to have your cards represent not only the units of value that your
team is expected to deliver but also your capacity to deliver them.
The finest of fine-grained tasks may not need to be separate cards
on the board; instead, attach them to the main card as to-do lists or
subtasks. Work items should be small enough to move across the
board at a relatively uniform pace.

15
 STEP THREE | GATHER ‘ROUND THE BOARD

How to Hold a Kanban Retrospective HELPFUL TIPS

At the end of every week, gather around the board to evaluate
your Kanban system. Observe the flow of work and add a You don’t have to wait until
new question each week. By week four, you’ll be asking four a retrospective to make an
questions. improvement.

WEEK 1
Q: Is there any hidden work in process (WIP) that we haven’t
gotten onto the board yet?
A: Searching for hidden WIP will be an ongoing theme for your first
few weeks. It’s not always evident and can take time to reveal itself.
As you find it, add it to the board. (Stop here, or if in weeks two
through four, move on to question two).

WEEK 2
Q: Can we identify any impediments to the flow of work?
A: Look at where work is piling up on the board, where work is
getting blocked, or parts of the workflow that may be “starved”
for something to work on. Discuss ways in which the process or
the team’s policies could be modified to remove impediments to
flow. Even after you finish these exercises, ask this question during
every retrospective. (Stop here, or if in weeks three or four, move
on to question three).

WEEK 3
Q: Are we tracking things at the right level of granularity?
A: If some of the work items are so big that they’ll take months
to move across the board, break them down into cards you can
complete in a few days or weeks. If your board is littered with
very small tasks, consider using task lists associated with the card
instead of a card for every small task that must be done in a day.
(Stop here, or if in week four, move on to question four).

WEEK 4
Q: A queue or buffer happens when work is in a holding pattern
before it goes to the next step. Are there queues or buffers in
your workflow that aren’t represented on the board?
A: If yes, add lanes into your process to represent these queues.
Managing the size of queues in your kanban system is a key
success factor to improving the flow of work. Identifying queues
will be an ongoing activity, even after you’ve completed the
exercises in this guide.

16
SAMPLE BOARD

to do plan develop test deploy done

in process done

Pay special attention to the start and end states. Where does the BOTTOMLINE
work for this team originate? What is the source of demand?
Empower individuals to
work together toward a
If you find that you have two teams working towards separate common goal. Kanban
goals, and those teams’ work rarely intersects, you may have more is about continuously
than one process. Try to reserve one board for each process or add improving your system and
a swimlane to the team board to show there are parallel processes managing the flow of work,
at work. rather than managing
team members and their
work directly.

Next Step: Limit your work in process.

17
 STEP FOUR | LIMIT YOUR WORK IN PROCESS

CORE KANBAN OBSERVATION

POINT
It’s not important that
Limit your work in process. workers stay busy; it’s
important that the work
It may sound counterintuitive, but limiting your work in process can keeps moving.
help you finish more work, more quickly. The more you dive into
Hitting a WIP limit isn’t a
multiple tasks at once, the less effective you become. failure or a problem to be
avoided. On the contrary,
Work in process (WIP) can be defined as all of the tasks you’re it’s an opportunity to
working on right now. Although often revered in today’s culture, change your system so it
benefits the team and its
task switching—also known as multitasking or context switching—
effectiveness. You should
has less than glamorous effects. Juggling simultaneous work run up against your WIP
doesn’t make you more productive. It just makes you more limits regularly. If you
distracted. don’t, they’re probably not
low enough. Team buy-in is
critical; let the team set its
Each time your attention switches to a different task, your brain
own WIP limit.
slogs through a neurological warm-up period that prevents you
from being wholly present with your work. Error and delay increase. WIP limits won’t prevent
The drain of multitasking on the team, as a whole, manifests in our cultural proclivity for
multitasking, but they will
repeatedly reprioritized work. Too much work in process also leads
show you the detriments
to larger and larger queues, further decreasing productivity.
that task switching can
have on your work.
The practice of limiting your work in process is what makes this a
Kanban system, rather than a visual to-do list. By using WIP limits,
you can improve the flow of work through the process steps you’ve
defined on your board. Limiting WIP also helps to focus the team’s
attention on shared goals and encourage collaboration. Having less
work in process creates shorter feedback loops within the process
and gives more flexibility to learn from how your work is flowing
through the system, allowing you to make adjustments on the fly.

LET’S GO
YOU WILL NEED
Your team, circled around your work on the board.

TIME
Block out 30 minutes. You might use more or less time, depending
on the size of your team and how much work is currently in
process.
18
ACTIVITY HELPFUL TIPS

1. Consider how a piece of work flows through your system by Kanban seeks to “pull”
looking at a card that’s recently made it to “Done.” Preferably, rather than “push” work
through your process.
choose a card that several team members worked on while it
moved through most of the defined workflow on your board. A push system “pushes”
finished work to the next
step, whereas a pull system
2. Ask: “How long did that card take to complete?” For this
“pulls” work from the
example, let’s say that 10 days passed between the card being preceding step only when
pulled onto the board and reaching the “Done” lane. (This is it has capacity. Limiting
known as a card’s cycle time.) WIP based on capacity (a
pull system) can help work
flow smoothly through the
3. Now, ask each person who worked on the card how much
board at an optimal rate.
time they spent actively working on it. You’ll probably hear Pushing large amounts of
a much smaller number. For this example, we’ll say that your work into the system clogs
team invested a total of six hours of active work. So why did it up and slows everything
the card take 10 days to complete? One reason to consider is down (and often makes for
queues. When step one was finished, the card waited in line for poor quality, too).
1.5 days before anyone picked it up to start step two. The card
continued in this fashion until it reached the “Done” lane. It’s
fairly typical—and sometimes even worse—for a card to spend
85 percent of its time in a queue. Using WIP limits, you can
keep the size of the queues in your process lower, so that each
item moves more quickly from step to step.

Side note: This is why many Kanban teams have acquired a

“no-estimate” reputation. Once you see that asking people to
estimate how much time something will take makes up only a
small percentage of how long it takes to realistically complete
the work, many people feel the freedom to stop estimating
small- to medium-sized tasks and focus instead on improving
throughput of the Kanban system.

4. As a team, identify all of the queues in your process. (Any

place a handoff occurs is most likely a hidden queue.) Now
identify the largest queues.

5. Add a WIP limit to your board to try to reduce the size of one
or more of the largest queues. You may add the WIP limit to
the lane that has the queue, or you may find that adding a WIP
limit to the lane before or after the queue reduces WIP better.
If the queue is a child of some top-level lane, you may consider

19
 STEP FOUR | LIMIT YOUR WORK IN PROCESS

SAMPLE BOARD

to do plan develop (5) test (3) deploy done

in process done

HelpDesk System Customization Team

To Do Doing Done

putting the WIP limit on the parent lane. In the sample board BOTTOMLINE
above, a WIP limit covers the “Develop” lane so it applies to the
Limiting work in process is
number of cards in both sublanes.
the primary way to modify
your Kanban system to
6. If a team member is consistently responsible for too many improve the flow of work.
work items, experiment with personal WIP limits (e.g., “Jason Reducing the size and
number of queues present
has a WIP limit of three. Only three items can be assigned to
in the process will lower
him at any one time.”). In general, we recommend process
overall WIP and tend
stage WIP limits, but if there’s a particular person who is often to make the work flow
overloaded, it’s appropriate to use personal WIP limits. through more smoothly.

What to do when you run up against the WIP limit

When you hit a WIP limit, stop doing the kind of work that adds
to that queue. Instead, let the work continue to flow through the
system. Go help a teammate or work on a task that doesn’t add
WIP on the board. Go run some errands. Start an online class. But
whatever you do, don’t pile on more WIP at this point.

Next Step: Measure and learn.

20
STEP FIVE | MEASURE AND LEARN

CORE KANBAN OBSERVATION

POINT
As you get better at
Continuous improvement. analyzing these metrics,
you’ll want to segment
Managing your work via a Kanban system reveals how the work them by card type, priority
is flowing through your process. It also gives you the tools to or another dimension that’s
measure flow and the levers to pull to improve it. important to your team.
For example, you could
say that your lead time for
The exercises you’ve gone through so far can lay a foundation for standard priority items
a team culture of continuous improvement. Now that you’ve tried is an average of 8.5 days
your first WIP limits, narrowed down the granularity of your work but that your lead time for
items and found as much hidden WIP as possible, it’s time to start production break-fix items
is 1.8 days.
measuring flow.

You’ll start by tracking four simple things: total WIP, blockers,

throughput and lead time.

Total WIP
Total work in process is all of the tasks currently on your Kanban
board. It’s anything that’s been started (by anyone) but not
completely finished. As you start limiting your work in process,
you’ll start seeing this topline number decrease. As a gut check,
divide your total WIP by the number of members on the team to
get an average WIP per person. Does it show that each person is
“doing,” for example, an average of 15 things? Does that seem like
too many?

Blockers
A blocked item can’t move to the next stage in your process
because of an issue. While similar to a bottleneck (both create
delays), a blocker typically signals an unfinished dependency, a
defect or an unavailable skillset. For example, a blocker may arise
when you’ve sought information from an external source and can’t
complete further work until you receive a response.

Focus on three things when measuring blockers: How often are

items blocked? How long do they stay blocked? Where in the
process do blockers happen? In each daily standup, add “1” to the
“blocked days” for that card and note where the block occurred.

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 STEP FIVE | MEASURE AND LEARN

Throughput HELPFUL TIPS

Throughput is the number of items completed per time period. At
the end of each week, record how many items were completed (i.e., As you continue to
moved to “Done” and never moved backwards). Track this number seek improvements
from week to week to see how changes made in your Kanban to your process in the
system affect how much total work actually gets done. coming months, follow
these ideas to keep the
Lead Time energy up among your
Lead time is how long a card takes to travel across the entire team:
board. The clock starts when a card is pulled onto the board and
Focus your experiments
stops when it reaches the “Done” lane. On the back of each card, and metrics on improving
record the start date. Then, when the card reaches “Done,” record one or more of your team’s
the date and calculate how many days (or working days) passed capabilities, whether it’s
quicker delivery, predictable
since its start date (see the example card on page 24).
delivery or the capability
to deliver higher quality,
Many calculations are possible with lead time and throughput measured in lower defect rates
and instances of rework.
metrics. Keep it simple in the beginning and only record the
average lead time of every card that was finished that week (i.e., Continue to encourage team
the cards you counted to measure throughput). ownership of the process and
focus improvement efforts on
the Kanban system, rather
On an ongoing basis, compare these four metrics to see what than individuals.
effect they have on each other. As you reduce the size of queues
in your system, it should start to reduce your average lead time. As
you experiment with ways to manage blockers more effectively,
you should also see lead time reduced. As you continue to
limit your WIP, and work together as a team to complete work
collaboratively, you should see throughput improve.

LET’S GO
YOU WILL NEED
Your team. On the whiteboard, data collected from the last three to
four weeks since you began recording metrics on the back of the
cards.

TIME
Do this during your weekly retrospective.

22
As soon as you’ve finished the exercise in step four, take time HELPFUL TIPS
during every weekly retrospective to record data on the back of
your cards for blockers, start date, completed date, throughput and Continue to study ways to
lead time. improve your Kanban system
by using the resources section
of this guide.
At each weekly retrospective, calculate and record:

• Throughput: the number of cards completed this week

• Lead time for each card (completed date and start date)

• Average lead time for this week

• Cards completed with > 0 blocked days

• Total blocked days

• A list of places where cards were blocked

Tally the above for three to four weeks before beginning this
exercise.

Running Experiments in a Kanban Retrospective

Instead of asking the four questions from exercise two, you’ll run
experiments out of your retrospectives.

An experiment, in this instance, isn’t much different from a basic

scientific experiment. Evaluate the current state, form a hypothesis,
test the hypothesis with an experiment, measure the result and
then draw a conclusion.

As a team, review your throughput, average lead time, blocker

data and total WIP metrics. Have the team pick one of those four
metrics for your first experiment.

For example, if your average lead time for the past three to four
weeks is 11 days (varying between two and 19), you might decide
to shoot for less than 10 days. If your blocker data suggests that
you might be leaving items blocked longer than necessary, your
experiment might be to modify the way your team responds to
blockers. Perhaps your team will decide to adopt a “stop the line”
mentality; if a card is marked as blocked, it’s “all hands on deck” to
remove the blocker as quickly as possible.

23
 STEP FIVE | MEASURE AND LEARN

SAMPLE CARD

Start Date: June 8

Blocked Days: 1 2
Blocked location: Testing
Completed Date: June 18
Lead Time: 10 days

Or, if your throughput is three items per week, you might decide BOTTOMLINE
to try to increase it. If your total WIP still says that you have, on
Kanban is an evolution,
average, seven items in process per person, your team might try
not a revolution. When
to reduce total WIP to see if it affects throughput. You could then you understand the why
look for queues in the process where you could reduce the WIP and how of your process,
limit and watch to see what it does for throughput. your team can begin to
make small but continuous
improvements.
One final example, coming at it from another direction. If your
blocker data suggests that you could improve by managing
blockers differently, your team could adopt a change in policy
for how blockers are managed and monitor lead time, WIP and
throughput to see what effect the policy change has on those
metrics.

From this point forward, think of your retrospectives as a place to

formulate and evaluate experiments. You may have more than one
experiment running at once, but always run at least one.

24
CONCLUSION

Congratulations.

You now have a running Kanban system. You’re visualizing your

work, limiting your work in process, measuring your team’s
effectiveness and beginning a habit of continuous improvement.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS

W. Edwards Deming once said, “A bad system will beat a good
person every time.”

At LeanKit, we believe that all people want to do their best work.

We believe that people encounter obstacles that prevent them
from doing great work when systems fail.

When you adopt Kanban to manage your system for work—and

embark on a journey of continuous improvement—you are freeing
people and organizations to do their best work, own the systems in
which they work and collaborate to improve those systems.

You’ve now begun the journey that leads to systems thinking and
continuous improvement so that bad systems are no longer in the
way of good people doing good work.

Next: Learn more from the Resources section.

25
 RESOURCES
[WEBINAR] About LeanKit
DESIGNING YOUR KANBAN BOARD TO MAP YOUR PROCESS LeanKit is recognized
with Chris Hefley by the Agile and Lean IT
community as the most
Creating your first Kanban board isn’t always easy—and you don’t flexible and powerful tool
have to get it 100-percent right. With the help of some good advice available for implementing
you can build the right foundation to improve incrementally over visual project management
time. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to map your process to reflect based on Kanban systems.
your reality as closely as possible, design your board to capture the In addition to IT, our
customers use LeanKit to
right metrics for improvement and address common gotchas such
manage and collaborate
as wait time and hidden work. Watch the webinar: on projects in fields as
leankit.com/blog/map-your-process diverse as engineering,
manufacturing, marketing,
customer service, technical
[BOOKS & AUTHOR WEBSITES] support and many more.
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology LeanKit was recognized
by Gartner, Inc. as a “Cool
Business by David J. Anderson (djaa.com)
Vendor” in Program and
Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Portfolio Management
(PPM) for 2013.
Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry (PersonalKanban.com and
ModusCooperandi.com) Since our founding in 2009,
we’ve grown to serve more
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your than 250,000 users around
Business Win by Gene Kim (RealGeneKim.me) the world at companies
such as Adobe, DuPont,
Stop Starting, Start Finishing by Arne Roock Nokia, Siemens, Spotify
(Software-Kanban.de) and Steelcase. For more
information, visit www.
LeanKit.com.
[BLOGS]
“Kanban Kata” by Håkan Forss (hakanforss.wordpress.com)

“Kanban and Its Flight Levels” by Klaus Leopold

(klausleopold.com/2013/07/kanban-and-its-flight-levels)

“Kanban Maturity Model” by Yuval Yeret

(leansystemssociety.org/mashing-up-kanban-cmmi)

[EDUCATION]
LeanKanban University (LeanKanbanUniversity.com)

[GAMES]
getKanban Board Game by Russell Healy (getkanban.com)

26
KEY TERMS
BLOCKER PULL SYSTEM
An internal or external factor preventing A work process where each stage only pulls
progress, thereby limiting the ability for the work into progress when it has capacity to do
work to move from one phase in your process so; the opposite of a push system, where work
to the next. is assigned and added to a queue, regardless
of capacity.
BOTTLENECK
A constraint in the system that limits the SOURCE OF DEMAND
flow of work. Identifying bottlenecks makes The business goal that is driving the
it easier to reduce their impact and provides requirement for work. The source of demand
a mechanism for controlling work flowing is sometimes an external customer and
through the process. sometimes an internal business stakeholder.

HIDDEN WIP TASK SWITCHING also known as Context

Work that a team member is working on but Switching or Multitasking
hasn’t added to the board. Shifting attention between multiple pieces
of work. Limiting task switching can allow a
KANBAN SYSTEM person to work more efficiently by minimizing
A display of visual indicators, namely cards, the amount of time required to redirect
that signals what the process needs exactly cognitive function to a new activity.
when the process needs it. Also: a way to
visualize work and workflow. VISUAL MANAGEMENT
A philosophy that work is better managed
PROCESS through visual systems, such as Kanban,
The series of actions, steps or stages that a than text-based lists or spreadsheets. The
piece of work goes through to be considered philosophy posits that visualizing work as it’s
“done.” being done better reveals problems at earlier
stages, leading to lower cost solutions.
PROCESS MAP
A visual representation of the steps needed to WIP LIMIT
complete a piece of work. A constraint that can be applied to either
parts of a workflow (e.g., a process step) or to
an entire workflow to help prevent potential
PULL MECHANISM
bottlenecks that hinder the continuous flow of
The action of pulling work based on the
work in the system.
opportunity and capacity to fulfill the needs of
the system.
WORK IN PROCESS (WIP)
Work that has been started but is not yet
“done.”

27