Sunday, April 12, 2015

KanBan - An introduction

Note: Refer Project management main page here

Kanban is way for teams and organizations to visualize their work and identify and eliminate bottlenecks.
Kanban is a method to gradually improve (any business function can benefit from applying Kanban).

In Japanese, the word “Kan” means "visual" and "ban" means "card", so Kanban refers to visual cards. Kanban is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production.

Kanban was originally invented as a part of the famous Toyota Production System. It is associated with the design of pull systems and the concept of delivering just-in-time good

KanBan follows a workflow. In simplest terms, it can be a big board with cards placed for each hase.
There are numbers at the top of each phase and these are the limits.
Limiting the amount of work-in-progress (WIP) reveals bottlenecks dynamically so that one can address them before they get out of hand.

Read below for practical explanation:

The board below shows a process where there is a workflow to be followed:
  1. Requirement phase (limit of 5)
  2. Design Phase (limit of 3)
  3. Development Phase (limit of 4)
  4. Testing Phase (limit of 3)
  5. Release (limit of 5)
One can see that the process cannot progress until the testers have finished a task.
This dynamically reveals the bottleneck (in this case its the testing phase).


 Once the testers have finished a task, the task is moved from "Testing" to "Release" and the workflow can now move ahead.


As the workflow moves ahead, its helps to dynamically track the bottleneck. It may not be Testing all the time. Each time (based on various factors like resources, requirement skill etc) a new phase could become a bottleneck.


 If a bug is encountered in the Testing phase, a new requirement is created for the same.



Do let me know your views.
Stay tuned for more Agile based articles.

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