- Kanban is a great way for teams to optimize their work.
You can visualize your work items
and optimize the flow of work across the board.
Then you can see ways to improve the work
and deliver greater value.
Still, there are two big challenges with kanban.
The first is that kanban in itself
is not a great change management platform.
The second is that kanban is often
not a very fun way to work.
Enterprise agile is a large organizational change.
You need to change your culture
and add new roles and processes.
Kanban doesn't give you the tools you need
to make big changes.
Instead, it focuses on improving your current process.
That might not be a bad thing.
After all, lean manufacturing depended heavily
on the Japanese concept called kaizen,
which is typically translated as continuous improvement.
That leaves much of the improvement
in the hands of the team.
Think of it this way.
I once worked for an organization
that was having trouble keeping people on their kanban team.
Unfortunately, every time one of the managers had challenge,
they would pull their employee from the team
to work on this issue.
So I worked with the team
to create something called a peel off board.
It would show the impact of the project
any time someone was peeled off to work on another issue.
The board would list out the person's name,
and next to them it would have all the kanban cards
that wouldn't be completed.
The board clearly showed that all these peel offs
had an impact on the project timeline,
but that didn't change the managers' behavior.
They were behaving as they always had,
and the added visibility wasn't any incentive to change.
Most large organizations have to change
from both the bottom and the top.
That means that employees have
to be motivated to make a change,
and managers have to buy in to fixing the status quo.
Kanban's focus on improving the current process
might shortchange the momentum you need to make big changes.
That's also why in many ways,
kanban is not always the most fun way to work.
Teams don't always get excited
about going from delivering every seven weeks
to delivering every six weeks.
What does excite people is the idea
of radically improving your organization.
Even if it doesn't happen,
sometimes it's better to set the goal
of delivering every two weeks.
Practical, incremental improvements might be more realistic,
but it might not have people spring
out of bed in the morning.
Kanban's in danger of creating the opposite challenge.
Sometimes it makes the work too repetitive.
Remember that kanban is based on lean manufacturing.
A lot of these manufacturing processes work fine
for repetitive work.
An assembly line has been optimized to deliver a product.
But in a software company,
it's not the most effective way to engage your employees.
Most of what kanban teams deliver
is still considered creative work.
It will be either creative problem solving like software,
or it might even be creative operational work.
Either way, it's likely to be something different every day.
The board in itself can have a dull consistency to it.
Even though the work might change,
the board always seems to stay the same.
The key challenge is deciding
how important it is for your teams to have fun.
There are many ways that teams can improve kanban.
They might add balloons you can pop in the deployed column
or have little celebrations at the end of each release.
But in the end,
that can distract from the very real question
of what motivates your employees.
While kanban is terrific
at optimizing your current processes,
if your employees want a radical organizational change,
then it might not be the best place to start.