Learn Kanban Methodology Concepts with Interactive Flashcards
Master key concepts in Kanban Methodology through our interactive flashcard system. Click on each card to reveal detailed explanations and enhance your understanding.
Visualization
Visualization is a key concept in the Kanban Methodology. It involves representing work items visually to give a clear understanding of the work and workflow. Visualization is effective in identifying bottlenecks, seeing the big picture, and understanding where attention is needed. Flow charts, storyboards, and Kanban boards with sticky notes or cards are frequently used tools for visualization. These tools make it easier to track progress and manage work, which ultimately promotes transparency, collaboration, and efficient decision making within the team.
Work In Progress Limit
Work In Progress (WIP) Limit is a rule that limits the maximum amount of work items in the different stages of the workflow. By establishing a WIP limit, team members are unable to take on more work than they can handle, which helps to keep the workflow balanced and prevent bottlenecks. This method also ensures a smooth flow of work and reduces the lead time. It encourages the team to complete the current task before taking on new ones, boosting productivity and improving the quality of work.
Flow Management
Flow Management is about understanding and managing the work cycle. It includes observing the progress of work items through the workflow, identifying bottlenecks, and adjusting the workflow or team behavior when necessary. The aim is to achieve a smooth, fast, and predictable workflow. Flow management enables the team to anticipate issues, manage capacity, enhance flexibility, and deliver consistently. This concept is closely related to Lean ontology, focusing on reducing waste, and improving efficiency and quality.
Improvement Culture
The concept of Improvement Culture is centered around continuous improvement and change for the better. Regular reviews, reflections, and learning enable the team to identify opportunities for improving the product, process, and performance. The culture promotes experimentation, learning from failures, and propagating successful changes across the team or organization. Thus, it fosters innovation, resilience, and a commitment to delivering the best possible value to the customers. Improvement Culture is integral to Kanban’s philosophy of ‘Change Management’ and ‘Service Delivery Improvement'
Lead and Cycle Time
Lead and Cycle Time are crucial metrics in understanding the efficiency of a Kanban system. Lead time starts from the moment a task enters the 'To Do' column and ends when it is completed, while Cycle time only considers the period a task is actively being worked on, excluding the time it was spent waiting. By monitoring these metrics, teams can gain a better understanding of their workflow efficiency and find bottlenecks to address for continuous improvement. Understanding these metrics allows for improved future predictions, ensuring greater efficiency and productivity.
Explicit Policies
The Explicit Policies principle involves making the rules of the Kanban process explicit so that everyone on the team understands how the work is organized and managed. This visibility ensures that everyone is on the same page and contributes to a higher degree of transparency, which is fundamental for trust within the team. Explicit policies may cover topics like workflow definitions, ticket descriptions, or definitions of done. They are not fixed and can be adjusted to respond to changing team needs.
Kanban Boards
Kanban Boards are tools used to visualize the workflow and track the status of individual tasks from start to finish. The board is typically divided into multiple stages of a work lifecycle, e.g., To-Do, In Progress, Review, and Done. Tasks are represented as cards and move through these stages as work progresses. A well-managed Kanban Board allows for easy identification of bottlenecks, a balanced distribution of workload, transparency on team’s work, and a clear understanding of the workflow stages.
Pull System
The Pull System is a cornerstone of Kanban. In contrast to traditional push systems where tasks are assigned to team members, in a pull system, team members ‘pull’ tasks as they are ready to handle them. This results in a smooth workflow, reduces the risk of overloading, and ensures team members are only working on what they can accommodate. The pull system empowers team members by allowing them to regulate their workload and promotes a more balanced and efficient workflow.
Feedback Loops
In the realm of Kanban Methodology, Feedback Loops are a significant concept. Feedback loops play a major role in the iterative development where there's a constant feedback between teams regarding ongoing projects. This feedback, received from both customers and team members, helps in revising the project according to its evolving needs and to better solve issues, which leads to a more efficient and effective work process. Regular meetings, retrospectives and reviews are tools to keep feedback loop healthy and active. Thus, feedback loops are crucial in maintaining a clear and updated understanding of development for all involved.
Service Delivery
Service Delivery is a key Kanban concept, it refers to the process of providing a service or product to a client or customer. In Kanban, the focus is on delivering small, incremental changes to the customer regularly. This agile principle helps to avoid the 'waterfall' method of delivering a large, final product at the end of the project. The advantages to this approach include: the ability for the team to adapt and change the product as per feedback, hence resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty towards the service provider.
Collaboration
Collaboration is another central principle of Kanban. It's a simple belief that people working together can attain better results than working individually. Team members work together to complete tasks, solve problems and continually improve processes. In a Kanban environment, collaboration is encouraged not only within teams but also between different teams, departments and even with clients and stakeholders. This collaboration not only enhances the work product but leads to a more in-depth and shared understanding of the work and goals.
Customer Focused
The principle of being Customer Focused is integral to Kanban. The primary goal of any service or product is to meet the customer’s needs and provide value. Kanban facilitates this by allowing for flexibility and adaptability in the workflow, ensuring that the work delivered reflects the customer’s evolving needs and expectations. This agile approach enhances customer satisfaction and builds a long-term business relationship.
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