The last 20 years have observed the booming and rapid adoption of Agile software development. Through our last post “Agile software development at a glance”, we know that Agile refers to a collection of lightweight frameworks and practices, like Scrum, XP, and Kanban, that are widely-embraced due to their versatility and effectiveness.
Together with Scrum and XP, Kanban is the next commonly adopted practice in both on-shore and offshore software development outsourcing settings. The latest 12th Annual State of Agile report (2018) shows that the “use of Kanban grew from 50% to 65%” from 2016-2017 alone. Kanban is also believed to be the “best method for executing lean thinking in practice”. As a result, Kanban is one important Agile methodology that Axon Active has been applying since our inception in 2008.
What is Kanban? What are the benefits of using it? How to learn more about Kanban? This article will give you the answers to some of your most basic questions about Kanban, particularly in the software outsourcing industry.
What does “Kanban” mean?
The word “Kanban” comprises “kan” and “ban”, which literally mean “visual” and “card” (“board”, or “signal”) in Japanese. Generally, Kanban means visual board, signboard, or visual signal. Kanban methodology is widely known for the use of Kanban – which makes use of visuals, or cards on a whiteboard or glass wall. In the IT outsourcing (ITO) industry, Kanban is increasingly employed to enhance the effectiveness of Scrum and other Agile methodologies.
What is Kanban?
A basic Kanban includes three columns, based on 3 basic types of tasks: to-do, doing, and done. Kanban gives visuals of how tasks progress in the development cycles as they move from column to column.
Kanban is not confined to one single team or one iteration. In fact, it promotes the visualization of the whole workflow and encourages the collaboration of individuals in a team and the collaboration of multiple teams across many functions and organizations.
Elements of a Kanban
1. To-do
Items in To-do column are called backlogs. Backlogs are tasks, or to-dos, that clients and development teams have in mind that need to be completed. Backlogs can be a breakdown of a bigger ambitious plan for the software, and there is no upper limit for backlogs in the To-do column.
Advanced application
Some companies afford a Stories or User Stories column before To-do to give development teams better pictures of where the backlogs come from.
2. Doing
Items in Doing column is called works-in-progress, or WIPs. Unlike backlogs that are not constrained by an upper limit, WIPs need one to make the whole process work efficiently.
In practice, people may habitually start off a project with 10 tasks, but they normally fail to get all 10 tasks to Done in the end. Delays in software development cost both clients and development teams time, money, and other resources while hurting client’s trust. This is when limits on WIP come to the rescue. WIP limit sets the maximum work items that a developer is handling and to accomplish at a time.
Benefits of WIP limits
Successful application of WIP limits guarantees development teams two seeable benefits:
WIP limits help a team-member to stop starting new tasks and start finishing pending WIP, normally postponed due to unexpected obstacles (“bottlenecks”). In Scrum work environments, Kanban is usually incorporated; and in such a case, bottlenecks are easily revealed through daily stand-up meetings (daily Scrum) and resolved much more fruitfully with the help of other team members or whole team’s effort.
It encourages monotasking mindset and avoid multitasking – which wastes the team 50% more time and generating 50% more mistakes. Time and time again, studies by Stanford University, Iowa State University, and McGill University show monotasking workers score much higher indexes of productivity and performance than their peers. Obviously, using Kanban allows teams to deliver products of much higher quality and boost client’s trust in team’s capabilities.
Advice of Axon Active expert
According to Scrum Alliance expert and Axon Active’s CIO Sebastian Sussmann (2019), it is important to note that boards without WIP limits are not a Kanban. With the use of WIP limits, development team leaders and members can quickly revisit the team’s most valuable work and redirect their focus on the most important tasks at hand.
And because of this, Axon Active’s ICT team has applied Kanban over the years to develop and maintain some of the most stable and secure offshore IT infrastructures. This enables our development teams to solely focus on creating values for our clients.
Advanced application
In certain contexts, Doing can be jazzed up with smaller columns like Design, Development, or Testing, to help the teams become aware of work-progress in much more detail. Columns like Pending can also be created for items that stumble upon obstacles that are not inclusive in the team’s scope-of-work and decision-making power.
3. Done
Items in Done has no special name; we just simply call it Done items. Once the items are moved to Done, that means they are completely accomplished and there’s no future follow-ups or turning-back to previous columns.
4. Other elements and relevant terms
Swim lanes: Another way to visualize person-in-charge (or department-in-charge) and their tasks is by dividing the Kanban with horizontal “swim lanes”. Swim lanes help managers easily spot each team member’s individual workload and how their work “flow” goes.
Avatar: a visual representation of the person-in-charge of particular tasks. Color code for different members’ cards can also be used.
Cycle time: the time counted manually by teams since a ticket starts being worked on (Doing) until it’s finished (Done). It makes product deliveries predictable for both teams and clients.
Lead time: the total time length from when a task (ticket) is created in To-do until completed (Done).
In fact, lead time can be calculated using Little’s Law formulae (below, only for a stable system with no bottlenecks). The law was originally invented by MIT Professor John Dutton Conant Little for service system but has been widely applied in the software development outsourcing industry.
History
Kanban methodology originated from the Toyota Production System (TPS), which was invented by Toyota manager Taiichi Ohno in the late 1940s – early 1950s. TPS was a model borrowed from supermarkets’ logistical control system, aiming to reduce costs of excessive inventory by managing stocks at levels sufficient and in time for customers’ purchasing. TPS, or just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, did so through the use of cards to keep managers abreast with automotive in-stock supplies. It is interesting to know that to this day, JIT manufacturing model is still favored by Toyota, Harley Davidson, Dell, ZARA, Walmart, Oral-B, and McDonald’s.
Kanban boom
The booming of Kanban in software industry is marked by the publication of two books.The undeniable success of Kanban application in automotive manufacturing in the 1950s had convinced David J. Anderson to adapt Kanban to the software industry in 2004. When working on a project with Microsoft’s IT department, he had introduced Kanban to the team to help them visualize their workflow. This positive experience at Microsoft has led him to apply Kanban at Bill Gates’ Corbis from 2006-2007 (see Recommendations for Kanban learning resources section below for his free downloadable presentation on this occasion).
Scrumban – Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development by former Microsoft’s software development manager Corey Ladas (published in 2009): Believing Kanban could improve on Scrum, he introduced Scrumban – a hybrid fusion of Scrum and Kanban, in this book.
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson (published in 2010)
Kanban methodology versus Kanban
There are two most important features of the Kanban methodology:
visualize the big picture of the entire workflow and business value chain from start to end, i.e. from even before the development process happens (such as business problems of customers that give rise to the need of developing requested software products), through the development period, to whether the post-development outputs bring any relevant business values for customers
quickly identify the entire workflow and exactly where the problems arisen to tackle them in a timely manner; by this, the flow is optimized.
Although Kanban helps carry out these important features of Kanban methodology, it is not Kanban methodology.
Local optimization and Global Sub Optimization
1. Local optimization
Kanban methodology demands users to uptake a lean mindset that reduces wastes and increase delivery outputs in quantity and quality on both local and global scales.
>>> Read on to see further explanation for lean mindset and pull system.
If each team in a local outsourcing company can visualize its workflow and the individual workflow of team members and quickly determine the problems and resolutions to solve the problems, we may say that company can optimize its work effectively on the local scale (or local optimization).
2. The reality of IT outsourcing situation
However, Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) settings oftentimes – if not always, take place inter-continentally. This needs a global solution. Well, imagine a bike with a broken brake and bent wheels with a pristine frame and a decent bell. The part of the frame and the bell are doing good jobs, but the whole bike cannot work as originally intended. Now, imagine software that is good on its own, but doesn’t bring any values to customers’ business or help solve their clients’ problems.
This analogy shows that looking merely at the local scale won’t be efficient enough to work in an international business context, especially that of ITO industry.
3. Global sub-optimization
The Kanban methodology asks the users to also take into consideration the interactions and synchronization of itself and the bigger system where software development is just a single phase of its. This whole system can involve many departments:
the customers where the software being developed come into play
the customers’ clients who use the product after the development process is over
and of course, the workings of the development teams and any other factors (or departments) that bring about the success of the software being developed.
Once there is local optimization in each part of the system on the local scale, it will naturally lead to global effectiveness of the whole value chain, also called global sub-optimization.
Characteristics of Kanban methodology
Kanban’s WIP limits are built upon pull system (a lean manufacturing strategy) for reduction of waste. At Axon Active, our ICT team has made use of Kanban methodology to effectively manage their ever-increasing number of “tickets” (aka WIPs) that need them to tend to on a regular basis. It is obvious that the use of Kanban allows Axon Active’s ICT team to easily visualize their own workload as a team and individually, and spot and reward high-performance team members. This in turns motivates other team members to be on par with the high-performance ones by working better – in terms of quantity and quality of their tasks. In the end, Kanban methodology motivates the whole team to achieve more, improves team performance, and enhances team spirit.
All of these are possible thanks to the WIP limits and pull system, which can be understood in the various ways below:
1. Continuous improvement
In the traditional push system, supermarkets offer customers what they already have in stock. And supplies are typically overstored compared with the buying demands, overburdening supermarkets with excruciating inventory costs.
In the pull system, the creation of a product is only initiated based on demands and is always kept up with customer requirements and preferences. This enables continuous improvement in the development of products, reduces waste (time, money, labor), and enhances productivity and customer satisfaction
2. Customer focus
In the push system, goods are ready-made and the one-size-fits-all products cannot fit buyer demands exactly. With pull system, companies get a chance to learn carefully about customer’s requirements for a product before making it. Pull system enables teams to generate products snugly-fit with client’s preferences and easily win client’s hearts for future business.
3. Stop starting, start finishing
As mentioned early, the WIP limits get the teams to stop starting (new tasks) and start finishing (current WIPs). As a result, they have to monotask. In other words, they can only “pull” new To–dos to Doing when the Doing column gets freed up. According to Agile Alliance, Kanban works especially-perfect with intangible work process.
4. First in first out
Kanban emphasizes first in first out strategy of the lean approach. That means the tasks which are initiated first must be “done” foremost. This eventually leads to elimination of long-pending WIPs and the resulted wastes of time, money, and labor. As a result, Kanban’s first in first out strategy eases the workload, shortens development-cycle time, speeds up production, and allows software teams to make continual deliveries to customers.
5. Predictability
WIP limits and Cycle time, which can be easily counted by teams, give Kanban workers and clients the “predictability” of when a task is done. This allows the teams to make different kinds of estimates and planning ahead to customers. It’s important to note that “there is no such thing as 100% predictability” (it-agile.de, 2013) and “a reliable prediction method [like Little’s law] can only function on the basis of a stable system” (Klaus Leopold 2017, p.19).
6. Versatility
Compared with Scrum, RUP, or XP, Kanban does not require time boxes and leaves a lot more “elbow room” for flexibility when changes happen. For that reason, Kanban is the most adaptive (rather than prescriptive) Agile methodology.
7. Slack
a. Traditional look on “productivity”
From management’s perspective, it has been a good working attitude for many years to see everyone in a team “as busy as a bee” all the time. They also believe that it’s a good practice to cram as many tasks as possible to the teams and push them to go fast. Because it feels like all resources (labor, time, and money) are utilized to the best of their capacities.
However, this push system of working has proven to only produce more valueless items (or “wastes”) time after time. A study on four internally-developed projects at four companies using traditional engineering approaches conducted in 1996 by The Standish Group in the Modernization Clearing a Pathway to Success report has found that among the functions and features studied, only 7% were always used while 45% were never used. It means the traditional mindset on productivity is not really practical in bringing the effectiveness and efficiency it was once thought. As a result, a new way of looking at productivity was necessary.
b. Limited capacity and capability
While push system imposes the expectations management has on the teams, pull system respects the reality of the team’s limited capacities and capabilities.
Let’s imagine the working of a printer. It is obvious that we cannot expect the machine to print faster than the speed it goes. Otherwise, there’s only yelling, frustration, paper jams, and a dysfunctional machine! Or let’s look at the road system. The heavier the traffic is, the more frustrated drivers feel, the more yelling they do. And yet the flow of vehicles move on the roads cannot be sped up any faster, if not being stuck in one place. Or, does eating a lot get you to digest faster? What you’ll get is indigestion and a cranky mood, indeed!
In these cases, maximized resource utilization equates to a constrained workflow. And it is true for any organism or any system, including a software development team. Once we push too much work, it will burden the whole system and make it dysfunctional and cease to work.
c. Definition of slack
Slack is the culture where that’s OK for people to not have something to do with the project at certain times. It is a “real usefulness” approach for the traditional problems mentioned above. Though “slightly counter-intuitive”, it is shown that some idle sitting or slacking off in development teams are necessary to balance out the need to optimize resource utilization and minimize wastes for management’s sake and to maximize valuable outputs to customers’ advantage. Slack makes sure the flow of work is efficiently, constantly “flowing” where “slacked” members are ready to work on tasks in the iteration, while resources are utilized according to the flow’s requirements.
d. So what do “slacking” members do, actually?
Waiting for their turn to handle their part of the task, like a paper in a printer waiting for its turn to be used!
More precisely, team members use slacking-off time to find faults in the working of the project, help out their colleagues who might be stuck with bottlenecks, code tools, or think of ways that generally improve the whole team and the efficiency of the whole workflow.
e. Benefits of slack
In this way, slack allows team members:
to freely “pull” the items they have the capacities of doing
to have room to “pull” items into the workflow however fast they want
For teams who use Pull, they enjoy two slack’s apparent benefits:
the slack or freedom to tackle work the ways that suit them best
the job leadership that enables teams to own their work, and move the work-items through the workflow faster.
f. How fast is just right?
It’s important to note that the term “fast” doesn’t equate to “speedy coding” or “running faster” literally. In the lean approach of pull system, fast is achieved by eliminating wastes along the way. How?
There are 3 things this lean approach encourages development teams to do:
Have continuous, conscious reflection on the values of tasks at hand: “What am I doing right now?”
Streamline work flow by removing work items that do not bring values: “Does this item really matter to customers?”
Only focus on valuable jobs that’s worth their attention most: “Now I see what I should focus my time and effort on!”
Kanban values
According to Agile Alliance, Kanban’s effectiveness is enhanced thanks to the following values:
Focuses on customers
Increases transparency: Kanban increases the visibility of workflow in an open and straightforward way for clients and team members
Improves collaboration between team members, and between clients and team members: It is due to the improved visibility of workflow and better collective understanding of work
Enhances continuity of workflow: Which is thanks to Kanban’s abilities of quickly identifying bottlenecks stumbled upon by teams and encouraging frequent feedback loops from clients
Motivates on-going, self-motivated learning capability and job leadership among team members for continuous, evolutionary improvement of products to happen.
Presents ample opportunities for reaching balance and respect for different opinions and capabilities from different perspectives in order to succeed
To see how Kanban can be used in practice, see Kanban in your daily work presentation by Axon Active’s CIO Sebastian Sussmann.
Kanban’s core principles and practices
There are 6 core principles to Kanban that have been applied by high-tech professionals:
Visualize your workflow with what you do now
Limit WIPs to produce more valuable work
Manage and enhance workflow by frequently revealing and overcoming bottlenecks together as a team
Make policies obvious for everyone to follow
Continuously learn and take work leadership across all levels throughout feedback loops
Make non-stop improvements and evolutionary changes (or Kaizen) using methods and models
Kanban’s benefits
1. For individuals
According to a study by Ikonen, M., Pirinen, E., Fagerholm, F., Kettunen, P., & Abrahamsson, P. (2011), Kanban is highly favored by IT pros because of a number of reasons:
Users believe Kanban is bringing positive changes to their work.
The methodology is super easy and simple to learn and use.
It is suitable and flexible for users of many different backgrounds.
Kanban is adopted because of peer-pressure.
The practice is used because the business contexts of users encourage them to do so.
2. For teams
In multiple surveys in 2016 and 2017, Kanban helps solve challenges frequently-faced by teams. Some of the outstanding benefits when using Kanban in team contexts, as shown in the table below, includes:
Better visibility of work (with 91% of surveyees either agreed or strongly agreed)
Improved development flow (86%)
Reduction in WIPs (81%)
Improved team communication (81%)
Improved team collaboration (78%)
a. In collaboration
Kanban supports better project visibility and project management by bringing the visibility of work to light and emphasizing monotasking mindset. For that reason, Kanban allows development teams to respond and make fuss-free adaptation to changes.
Kanban reduces project delays thanks to the first in first out and stop starting, start finishing strategies mentioned in early passages.
Kanban promotes equal work distribution as the board lays out clearly who is doing what, whether a work item is compatible with one’s capability, and whether they would need help from other team member(s) to reach the overall goals faster and more efficiently.
b. In communication
Kanban makes sure miscommunication is cleared out of the way. For example, development teams, oftentimes located in the non-English speaking countries, can learn meanings of vocabulary used by their clients that are new to them. Kanban can also avoids misunderstanding of pronunciation and accent differences between regions.
Kanban lays out all the follow-ups needed to be done up front and helps team cater sufficient number of tasks and deliver precise performance for clients.
Digital Kanbans allow clients to be kept in the loop of the project status and keep development teams abreast of client’s feedback instantaneously, despite of time-zone differences.
Kanban reduces the meetings that aim to clarify information communicated from clients to development teams, although meetings are still crucial to keep everyone on the same page and increase team spirit.
Challenges
1. Challenges in implementing Kanban methodology
Although Kanban proves to give Scrum and other Agile methodologies a boost of effectiveness and efficiency, it does have some limitations worth looking at.
A study of experienced Kanban users from 27 companies by Muhammad Ovais Ahmad, Jouni Markkula, & Markku Oivo in 2016 and another study by Maureen Tanner & Marcelo Dauane in 2017 have shown that there are three major reasons responsible for improper Kanban conduct at workplace.
Challenge 1
It’s the lack of proper training and the resulted misunderstanding of the method. According to the survey, Kanban is predominantly taught through peers and colleagues. “If a set of people have a bad habit, that habit is often duplicated by those they train”.
Challenge 2
The second challenge is the lack of management dedication for Kanban. It is because managers and leaders who are inclined to this behavior are fond of the traditional methodologies and practices and consequently refuse to change.
Challenge 3
The third is the lack of proper preparation before introducing Kanban to the teams. This makes team unfamiliar of the right Kanban practice and therefore unable to decide and respect WIP limits, which play a crucial role in project management success.
2. Kanban methodology as a challenge
According to Hamzah Alaidaros, Mazni Omar, & Rohaida Romli (2018), there are three reasons that make Kanban itself a challenge for teams.
Challenge 1
By nature, Kanban does not require specific time schedule as in the case of Scrum, which makes use of sprint’s time boxes. As a result, this makes it easy for teams to lose track of and fall behind schedule. However, this challenge can be overcome by incorporating Kanban with – or using Kanban to enhance, other Agile methodologies which is normally the case.
Challenge 2
WIP limits are difficult to decide because there is no formula that can help the team decide the optimum WIP limits. Fortunately, this challenge is only confronted in the beginning. As the teams become increasingly well-versed in Kanban, they will eventually learn to decide and flexibly adjust WIP limits that work best for them case by case.
Challenge 3
And last but not least, it’s trust issues. As mentioned in the early passage, one of Kanban’s most outstanding characteristics is slack. Which means any organizations and managers who support the use of Kanban in work environment should also learn to trust in their team’s focus on the work and capabilities to deliver performance to the best of their capabilities.
Industries using Kanban and recommended Kanban tools for ITOs
1. Industries
Kanban is flexible in application and therefore used within many industries, such as:
Automotive and motorcycle manufacturing
Information technology and software development
Video games and media
Finance
Fashion retails
Fast-food
FMCG
Among others
2. Kanban tools for IT outsourcing
Kanban can be done in two ways, physically and digitally, which serve equally-important roles in today’s flexible work settings. In fact, physical Kanban works best internally: for team members or cross-functional teams who meet one another on daily basis in a physical workplace.
In the meantime, digital Kanban suits better with offshore software vendors and clients because of the far distance and online communication mode predominantly-employed by both sides. Some useful digital Kanbans of our recommendation includes Jira, Trello, and Asana. Of course this is, by no means, an exhaustive lists of currently-available Kanban tools out there ! Feel free to explore for yourself!
Finally, it’s also important to note that Kanban tools should be treated as a means for support of problem-solving, but not the solutions to problems per se. Because in the end, it’s the human factor and interactions among Kanban team members that matter.
Through these Kanban basics from A-Z in IT outsourcing blog series, you are now equipped with the most fundamentals of Kanban to see how simple and yet flexible and effective an Agile methodology can be – in theory, and in practice. Don’t forget to scroll down to see our recommended Kanban learning resources at the bottom! We hope they will come in handy in your journey of exploring and applying Kanban successfully!
Recommendations for Kanban learning resources
It is important to get to know about Kanban inside out before you can pull it off. Follows are some of our recommendations for Kanban learning resources.
1. Local training workshops
Joining events and short-term training couses like Scrum Breakfast Vietnam, Fit for Kanban, and the like is a useful way to broaden your horizon on Kanban, interact with like-minded people locally, and learn from experienced experts of Kanban and other Agile frameworks. Keep yourself abreast of when such an event is organized near you through Axon Active’s news site, Scrum Breakfast Vietnam’s Facebook, or Scrum Breakfast Vietnam – Agile and Scrum’s Meetup now!
2. Websites
As published on Toyota’s website:
Toyota Production System
Just-in-time – Philosophy of complete elimination of waste
The origin of the Toyota Production System
Illustration of the Toyota Production System
Quiz on the Toyota Production System
3. Videos
History of the Toyota Production System (at Toyota Kaikan Exhibition Hall, Nagoya, 2005)
Taiichi Ohno on the Toyota Production System
John Shook, lean guru and former Toyota manager, speaks at the IW Best Plants Conference, by IndustryWeek TV.
4. Downloadable materials
Chapter 5: Little’s Law – By John D.C Little and Stephen C. Graves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology research paper, as published on MIT website (click for free download) |  |
Essential Kanban Condensed, by David J Anderson and Andy Carmichael (click for free download) |  |
Kanban Roadmap: How to get started in 5 steps, by Leankit (click for free download) |  |
A Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering, a presentation at Corbis in 2006/2007 by David J. Anderson (click for free download) |  |
5. Books
Books remain man’s best friends (besides dogs!) and that is why below are some interesting books for Kanban learning:
Evolution of Toyota Production System (2017)
By Taiichi Ohno |  |
Scrumban – Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development (2009)
By Corey Ladas |  |
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business (2010)
By David J. Anderson |  |
Kanban in der IT: Eine Kultur der kontinuierlichen Verbesserung schaffen
By Klaus Leopold and Siegfried Kaltenecker |  |
Stop starting, start finishing
By it-agile.de |  |
Practical Kanban: From Team Focus to Creating Value
By Klaus Leopold |  |
Help work to flow: 30+ tips, techniques and games to improve your productivity
By Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves |  |
Personal Kanban: Mapping Work/Navigating Life
By Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry |  |
Real-World Kanban: Do Less, Accomplish More with Lean Thinking
By Mattias Skarin |  |
Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded): 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
By John Medina |  |
Brain at Work: Intelligenter arbeiten, mehr erreichen
By David Rock |  |
*Note: most books can be purchased from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.
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