Kanban in Project Management
Kanban 看板 translates directly to signboard from Japanese. The Kanban system was originally a inventory-control system developed by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota to reduce the waste (muda) in the production line and to improve the manufacturing efficiency.
The Kanban system is with some alterations applied as an agile project management tool. The basis of the Kansan system is to have a board with cards attached. Different parts of the board represent several stages of the development that all tasks go through. The cards represent the different tasks in the project, and move from left to right on the 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 six 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 part. This is true for all parts except the “start” and “finished” part, which is always unlimited
- Cards : Each task is represented by a card (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#
- Team: The team working with the tasks 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. Focusing on 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.
History
Kanban is now a popular system used by teams practicing agile project work. Until now the framework is mostly used by software development teams. Kanban is considered a prominent and relatively new framework, as it was first introduced (to this use) by Microsoft in the early 2000’s. Nonetheless the Kanban methodology date back more than 50 years.
Kanban was first implemented in the Toyota factory in 1953 by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer and the father of Kanban. The system was inspired by the grocery store model. The concept of this was that grocery stores was stocking just enough product to meet customers demand. This practice causes the inventory levels to match the customer pattern and therefore be at a minimum without affecting the customer. Thus the store gains efficiency in inventory management by decreasing the amount of excess stock.
Taiichi Ohno’s vision when implementing Kanban an alternated “grocery store model” to Toyota was to align their massive inventory with the actual consumption of materials. To communicate capacity levels at the different workstation on the factory floor in real-time workers would pass a card with this information between workstations. When the bach of materials used at one point in the production line was emptied, a card with this information was sent to the warehouse. Here it would be a new bach ready to be transported to the production line. After this the card would be sent to the supplier, where a new delivery for the warehouse was waiting to be shipped. This could be carried on in as many stages as desired. The Kanban framework for production lines is still very much used today, though it have been developed in tact with the the technology to a faster and more agile version of the same system.
When Microsoft introduced Kanban as a project management tool in the early 2000’s. The workstations was replaced by parts of a Kanban board and the cards was replaced with post-it’s. Other than that, the concept, value and advantages stayed the same.
