Three Kanban Reminders

I seem to have had a number of conversations recently which have all had some common themes. The general pattern has been that someone wants to talk about Kanban and let me know how its not working for them in some way. When I enquire further, and dig into the background some more, I’ve found that there are generally 3 things missing or misunderstood.

1. You still need discipline. I hear of teams who find traditional agile practices difficult, for various reasons, some which may be valid, and some which may not. They decide to drop those practices, which may or may not be due to a lack of discipline. Dropping those practices, and just keeping the board, does not mean they have a Kanban System. In fact, if the board doesn’t have WIP limits, its not really even a Kanban Board! Whether or not teams have the discipline to follow their original process, they do need to have the discipline to define their own process by creating explicit policies.
2. You still need cadence. The most common instance of a dropped practice that I hear is that of the time-box. The complaint is then that the team loses their rhythm, and that they have nothing to give them short term focus. They lose their sense of capability. What they have done is gone from a tightly coupled metronomic cadence, to an asynchronous, random and imperceivable cadence. There is a middle ground of a loosely coupled, poly-rhythmic cadence which is more resilient to the nature of their work, yet provides an ability to sense. As described above, it takes discipline to define this cadence.
3. You still need people. The last misconception is that a Kanban-based approach is removing people from the equation again by trying to simply optimise the current process. Personally, this is why I talk about increasing Potential as one of the impacts we want a Kanban System to have. The potential of a system – its ability to improve over time – is grounded in the human potential of the people who are a fundamental part of the system. Its the people, and their connections and collaborations, who are best placed to know how to change the system for the better now, and be able to continue to change the system as the landscape changes.

I believe that attendees at the recent Kanban Leadership Retreat in San Diego were having similar experiences and I saw on twitter that the phrase “there’s a lot of sh*t out there” was used! This is partly why I came up with the Kanban Thinking model. As I alluded to when I talked about Cargo Cult Kanban, the Kanban community is not copying Toyota’s Kanban implementation tool, but the thinking behind it. If you trying a Kanban-based approach and its not working, think about why, identify something to change, and run an experiment. See, its not really that different to Agile!