- Kanban helps you visualize and manage your product flow.
This is based on lean manufacturing.
It's about how work flows through your system.
Ideally, you'll want your work to flow through the system
like a leaf on a lazy river.
You don't want your work to get stuck
in the corners of your organization's process.
Your work should flow through
without being backed up and blocked.
A good flow should be steady and predictable.
On the other hand, a bad flow is unpredictable.
It usually means your work gets stuck
in different corners of your organization.
So let's imagine how this might work
in something like a sandwich shop.
A customer walks into the restaurant
and sits down at the table.
That's the start of your flow.
It's often called the start of the lead time.
The lead time is typically the time it takes
for the customer to enter the restaurant
and exit after having a sandwich.
The customer sits for five minutes
until they're greeted by one of the wait staff.
They bring a menu and ask the customer
if they want anything to drink.
The wait staff brings the customer a glass of water
and asks them what they'd like to order.
Then they write the order on a piece of paper
and place it in the work queue.
The wait staff visits the counter
every few minutes to pick up new orders.
When they see the finished order,
they bring it to the customer's table.
Even this simple flow has its own challenges.
The customer sat for a few minutes
for the wait staff to visit them at their table.
If the customer didn't want anything to drink,
then there was a wasted opportunity to take their order.
The food could have sat idle
as the wait staff was working to take other orders.
Each of these little steps adds waste
to the process and keeps your customers
from drawing value from your system.
So even here there's some opportunity
to improve your flow.
Maybe each table should already have a menu
with a glass of water.
That way a customer could order
when they see their wait staff.
You might also have the kitchen staff
take the sandwich directly to this customer.
That way the food doesn't sit idle
when the wait staff's working with other customers.
In a sandwich shop it's pretty easy
to see where your product is in the system.
With larger organizations, it's a little bit trickier
to see how a product flows through your system.
That's why it's important to look at your organization
and understand each step of the flow
and look for ways to optimize your whole system.
Remember that the very first property in kanban
is to visualize workflow.
In a sense, all the tools in kanban are designed
to make work more efficiently flow through the system.
As you can imagine, there are a bunch of different things
that would slow down how work flows through your system.
Your teams might be working on too many things at once.
Maybe you have some fast teams and some slow teams.
That means that your fast teams
can only go as fast as the slow teams.
You can also have teams that have
a long list of things to do,
so they get clogged with backed up work
and have a tough time getting anything done.
Each of these challenges can hurt your flow.
The trick is to manage these challenges
and figure out ways to improve the whole system.