What Kanban can bring to a project
With Kanban, we see three main purposes, to visualise the flow of tasks, yet also it is used to work up the tasks faster.
Other good practices are the dashboards and statistics that Kanban offers. When did a task come to the board and when it has been finished. This enables you to forecast how much time is needed for a certain type of task. The focus lies on “time to value” or “time to market”.
Just to mention some metrics:
- WIP Limits: Work in progress (WIP) limits are in my opinion a little bit underrated. You are working with the columns in Kanban, a WIP is defined per column, e.g. that you can have a maximum of 5 tasks per column. This limits you to add new tasks before you finish the ones already fed into the column.
- Lead time/ cycle time: Kanban helps to keep an eye on the team’s – cycle time performance. They help you to deliver increments just in time to all stages of delivery and to market.
The most important point is that based on Kanban you can make forecasts. Kanban says that as far your tasks on the Kanban same big are based on the time taking to fulfill them you can forecast how much time will be needed for the delivery. This can be used for contracts defining and fulfilling given SLAs.
Success factors of Kanban
To avoid the pitfalls of not having WIP limits defined and to follow no metrics we see it as crucial to have certain Kanban education, consider taking consultancy, and stay strict with the Kanban practice, not only doing it because it is required. Also important is to ask yourself, if the Kanban is defined well and if you are not doing it inconsequently.