Lean with Kanban Kan – card.

Ban – signal

Kanban works with capacity in terms of hours. (ex: pool with 120 kids capacity – wearing red band)

EX: 5 team members are there with 35 hrs for each week. Total of 175 hrs are available. Sometimes the
team may be flooded with work and the next week may not be. Hence came up with an idea of dividing
the work into items. Similar to cards signaling in what state each of them is working upon

Kanban is called pull system. Ex, in a restaurant delivering cheese sandwiches when the last sandwich of
a batch is delivered the wait staff will signal to kitchen and the next batch will get ready. But only thing is
the team has to come up with the right size of the batch. If the batch size is very small there will be
customers waiting or if the batch size is big there may be sandwiches waiting to get delivered for a long
time.

Scrum and extreme program tells about breaking work into small piece so that it can be delivered in two
weeks of scrum, whereas Kanban talks about break work into small batches. This is the concept of JIT
(just in time) and lean management

Five properties of Kanban: (all adapted from Lean pricinples)

 Visualize workflow
 Limit work in progress (WIP ) – this is key lean principle
 Measure and manage flow
 Make policies explicit
 Recognize improvement opportunities

Mapping value stream

When you map value stream figure out which one has greatest value. Come up with all the processes
followed , sit together brain storm which one is adding value. Make a leanest path from beginning to
end.