Kanban in Project Management

This article in a nut shell: (200 word description of Kansan in project management)

in a nut shell: Many believe that agile and lean are two opposites, that one have to choose between one or the other. In this article it is argued that with the Kanban project management, a project can be lean and agile at the same time.

The concept

When managing a project a physical or virtual Kanban board is utilised. The flow functions similar to what it would do in a Kanban factory, except here the physical part is exchanged with a task in the project and the workstations is replaced with parts of the Kanban board. The board can be set-up and divided however the user like, nonetheless the main concept is always the same and can be summarized by these points Limit WIP (work in process): The board is divided in parts, and each part can only have a set number of tasks, thus this don't need to be the same for every task. This is true for all parts except the “start” and “finished” part, which is always unlimited Cards (Kanban translates to visual card): Each task is represented by a post-it note or similar Flow: The tasks on the board are moved from left to right between the different parts. The person performing the task is moving the post-it Agree on some rules for when a task can be set as finished. Kaizen (constant improvement) 1: The team working with the Kanban board have to get together on a regular basis to analyze the flow. Especially tasks that are stuck on the board Kaizen (constant improvement) 2: There is no Kanban police - and if you need to alter your board or break your rules that's ok, but let the rest of your team know.

The board

The Kanban boards for project management most often consists of three main parts “To Do”, “DOING” and “Done”. Each of these is divided in two or more sub sections. There are many reasons for doing this, the main one being to visualize when the task is ready to go to the next main part.

To Do

In this section all tasks that are in your “backlog” is placed. This part of the board have no rules for a upper limit. The number of tasks here is most often limited by your lack of knowledge of the future, as you don't know all the “To Do” tasks yet.

To enhance the flow of your board you can make a “Breakdown” part subsequent to the “To Do”. This Breakdown part is managed by a rule. This can forexaple be that all task must be limited to take approximately two working days. If the task initially is longer/larger than this, it is divided into several smaller tasks before moving on to the next part of your board. When the tasks are placed here, thay are ready for the next main part “Doing”

Doing

In this part of the board all task that are worked on are located. This part of the board is almost always divided into several smaller parts. An example of this can be Plan, Develop, Test and Deploy.

Plan

In this section the work is planned, this can be allocation of resources or finding a possible solution

Develop

Here is where the task go from an ide to a product. This section is also often divided to the sub sections In Process and Done. The reason for having a Done part, is to make it visual when the tasks is ready to be transferred to the next stage, testing. Testing