STATIK or Systems Thinking Approach to Implementing Kanban enables you to understand how your system behaves as a whole. In other words, it favors a holistic approach to analyzing parts of the system as a whole instead of in isolation.
The systems-oriented approach greatly influences how you define the step you need to introduce Kanban in your organization. These steps may be more iterative than sequential, using lessons from one stage to the next to inform and influence others in a collaborative environment.
In this article, we’ll review the Kanban system, its implementation via the STATIK method, and all you should know to use it for effective service delivery.
Kanban and Its Role in Process Improvement
When companies consider advancing efficiency in their operations, they typically optimize critical aspects. Kanban is a proven in-demand tool for Lean workflow management and helps to define, manage, and improve services that deliver knowledge work.
Your organization probably uses Kanban already, however the main objective for implementing Kanban is to eliminate waste and improve quality by producing what’s needed as and when due. However, it has since matured in adoption in other industries, such as software development.
What is Kanban and Where Does It Come from?
According to the Agile Alliance, the Kanban Method enables the design, management, and improvement of flow systems for knowledge work. Large-scale manufacturing concerns have used it since industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno introduced it at Toyota in the 1950s.
Kanban helps organizations to explore revolutionary change, beginning with their existing workflow. The method has its roots in using kanban – a set of visual signaling mechanisms to control work in progress for intangible work products.
The system was created as a simple planning system for controlling and managing work and inventory at every stage of production optimally.
The synonym for systems using the Kanban Method is flow. The idea is to reflect that work flows continuously through the system instead of being organized into distinct timeboxes.
The Principles of Kanban
Change Management Principles:
Principle #1 – Start with what you do presently
Regardless of your existing workflows, Kanban allows you to layer on systems and processes that don’t disrupt the current setup. It acknowledges the value of what’s on ground and works to preserve them.
However, Kanban indicates issues you need to fix, and supports assessing and planning changes to ensure implementation is smooth.
Principle #2 – Be willing to pursue incremental and evolutionary change
Some measure of resilience is built into the Kanban system. Therefore, it encourages small incremental changes performed over tim through collaboration and iterative feedback loops. Wholesale changes are not advisable to avoid resistance that stems from a fear of uncertainty.
Principle #3 – Enable leadership at all levels
People’s everyday insights define how they improve the way they work. Each shared observation – no matter the size – contributes to a culture of continuous improvement or kaizen as your company, team, or department aims for optimal performance. This is not a management-level activity.
Service Delivery Principles:
Principle #1 – Focus on customer or client needs and expectations
Your ultimate organizational objective should be to deliver value to the customer. Understand their expectations and needs in o4rder to learn the quality of services you will offer.
Principle #2 – Manage the work
You’ll only effectively empower your people’s capacity to self-organize around work when you manage the work in your network of services. You’ll then pay attention to desired outcomes and won’t be distracted to micro-manage those delivering your services.
Principle #3 – Review your network of services often
After developing a service-first culture, you need to evaluate it often. Regular reviews and assessment through Kanban enables you to improve customer outcomes.
The Importance of STATIK in Business Processes
The growing interconnectedness and complexity of the world validate the need for systems thinking. It provides a disciplined way to understand the world and develop innovative solutions to problems. It’s counter-intuitive to see how innovation emerges from such convolution and complexity, but that’s the power of systems thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. According to authors Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi in their book The Systems View of Life.
Most business leaders favor a linear path in decision-making. While it may work, linear thinking directs your focus to strictly cause-and-effect factors. In other words, it forcefully limits the range of one’s capacity to understand the influence and impact of other systemic forces. It ripples creativity and lowers the probability of finding new opportunities.
By contrast, systems thinking expands your perspective to enable you to easily surface innovation. Here are the reasons why systems thinking is so crucial:
1. Holistic perspective
Systems thinking drives you to shift perspective in order to manage the complex dynamics inherent in social systems. These environments include office departments, organizations, and even countries.
The ability to see the interconnected parts of a system, their historical evolution, and their interrelationships allows you to see new ways to accomplish business goals in three dimensions. Where you must equip internal teams to achieve some things, such goals are still automatically assigned to other stakeholders.
2. Culture of opportunities in the face of problems
Unlike linear thinking, a systems approach views corporate issues not merely as challenges to overcome but as a thread in a complex, interconnected web. It helps to resolve the problems in a way that simplifies things rather than risk making them more complex.
3. Rapid adaptation
How do you predict future outcomes without relying on past events? The short answer is “systems thinking.” It achieves this by offering a more intimate understanding of the surrounding structure and its elements.
Organizational consultant Daniel Kim teaches that structure largely determines behavior. Despite uncertainty regarding the precise timing and duration of the outcome, its nature and eventuality are reasonably clear.
Kanban Maturity Model
A maturity model enables you to assess the current effectiveness of your organization (or team). It lets you understand the capabilities you need to acquire to improve performance.
The (KMM) is a process-level improvement model that uses the Kanban Method to engineer process improvement across departments, teams, or your entire organization.
The model outlines seven maturity levels and how to successfully use the Kanban Method to navigate the levels and improve your business economics. It’s not just a board full of columns and coloured tickets but a way to manage organizational processes, and that’s the point of the Kanban Maturity Model.
What is STATIK, and How Does it Help You Implement Kanban?
A comprehensive introduction to STATIK requires exploring systems thinking and its benefits.
Again, Systems Thinking is a way of defining systems as complex elements with interrelated parts. The primary step in this process is to identify services, and for each service, the sequential routine includes the following:
- Understanding why the service is a good fit for the customer’s purpose
- Understanding what aspects of the current setup bring dissatisfaction
- Analyzing demand
- Analyzing capability
- Modeling workflow
- Discovering classes of service
- Designing the Kanban system
- Socializing the design and negotiating implementation
You may only use STATIK for one service. With more than one service, you apply Kanban practices and cadences to bring demand and flow across multiple services to equilibrium and continually improve.
In practice, you may take the steps in a different order, and you’ll likely revisit them in the future, while aiming for further improvement.
Therefore, when using Kanban through STATIK, here’s how to go about it:
Step 1 – Understand why the service is a good fit for the customer’s purpose
Because it’s often considered an advanced option, this first step is usually absent in novice or low-maturity implementations.
Look at the components that make up customer satisfaction with service delivery. These are commonly related to, but not limited to, lead time, predictability, quality, safety, and regulatory concerns. These criteria are described as the fitness criteria because they determine whether the customer assesses if the service delivery is “fit for purpose” or acceptable.
Next, you explore and establish expectation levels for all criteria. These are called fitness criteria thresholds. They’re satisfactory or “good enough” performances. These metrics are the Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, and can help to establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs) where appropriate The Fitness Criteria Thresholds are necessary to bring improvements and evolutionary change.
If your team skips this step, you’ll probably revisit it as the Kanban implementation and organizational maturity improve. There’s often a necessary measure of quantitative rigor for further improvements.
Step 2 – Understand what aspects of the current setup bring dissatisfaction
It occurs in two steps, including discovering what your customers are unhappy about and asking the delivery organization whether there are any sources of dissatisfaction. These ensure they don’t deliver on expectations due to their inability to perform professionally.
It’s often possible to match the external and internal sources of unhappiness, so fixing one inevitably fixes the other. For instance, a customer might have issues with interruption and disruption with unplanned or additional requests taking a higher class of service. Addressing the origins of such spontaneous and disruptive demand can help you eliminate the interruptions, lending more predictability to service delivery.
Workers can maintain flow while focusing on delivering the best service when you fix one side of the problem. Therefore, both sides end up happier because the customer also receives delivery within a reasonable margin of their original expectation.
The input for the Kanban system design comes from the sources of dissatisfaction. In designing the system, it’s also necessary to consider its capacity allocations and classes of services to remove as many problems as possible. Having minimal resistance to change makes it possible to achieve much – something in the domain of advanced coaching and beyond the scope of Essential Kanban.
Step 3 – Analyze demand
Designing a suitable Kanban system requires a thorough understanding of the demand. Let’s use an example – a bakery specializing in cheesecakes. We’ll explore the elements involved in analyzing the demand for this specific product.
Identify work item types
In the case of our bakery, the primary focus is on cheesecake requests. However, it’s important to determine the different types of cheesecake flavors or variations that customers demand. Striking the right balance between sufficient detail and convenient abstraction is key. For instance, separating classic cheesecake from flavored options allows for better risk management and resource allocation.
Analyze arrival rate and pattern
Each type of cheesecake has its own arrival rate, which refers to the volume of demand and the pattern of requests over time. By studying how demand fluctuates throughout the day, week, or month, you can identify peak periods, such as lunchtime, when demand is higher. This knowledge helps in managing resources effectively and meeting customer expectations during busy periods.
Consider business risks and expectations
Understanding the nature of arrival, volume, and associated business risks is crucial for designing a comprehensive Kanban system. In scenarios where demand coincides with immovable events like holidays or special occasions, prioritizing certain types of cheesecakes becomes necessary. It is important to address questions such as the quantity of demand, arrival dates, notice periods, and ensuring on-time delivery for critical events
Advanced demand analysis
As your Kanban system matures, you may further categorize demand based on additional factors such as planned vs. unplanned demand, value vs. failure demand, or even differentiating between customers’ need for delivery vs. information discovery. This deeper analysis helps shape the direction of your Kanban system and guides improvement actions as needed.
By analyzing the demand, you gain insights into the specific variations customers desire, the arrival patterns of demand, and the associated risks and expectations. This understanding lays the foundation for designing a robust and efficient Kanban system tailored to your needs, ultimately improving the overall workflow and customer satisfaction.
Step 4 – Analyze capability
Novice, immature, or non-comprehensive implementations often skip the step of analyzing capability. It may also happen in creating a greenfield system with no existing service delivery capability as a prerequisite.
In analyzing capability, you need to study historical data for service delivery. It consists of the following:
- Conformance with regulatory standards or requirements
- Functional quality
- Lead time
- Non-functional quality
- Predictability
The current capability is comparable to the service level expectations of the customers.
Considering the sources of dissatisfaction, significant gaps may exist between existing customer expectations and current capability.
Capability analysis may also include a historical cumulative flow diagram. There may also include some calculation of flow efficiency if effort expended or working time data is available in addition to the elapsed calendar time or duration.
Step 5 – Model workflow
It’s necessary to model workflow for each type of work item. You must distinguish workflow modeling from Lean Manufacturing and Toyota’s Gemba Walk and Value Stream Mapping techniques.
All this matters because the professional service of software development is an intangible goods industry. Kanban is more compatible with this because it adopts workflow mapping techniques borrowed from Lean Product Development. Similar workflow modeling techniques using a slightly different language exist.
You map the sequence of dominant steps to discover new knowledge.
The objective is to model knowledge work while identifying the activity that provides the most knowledge. Eventually, you can expect diminishing returns from this activity, indicating you can move on to the next dominant activity.
In software development, knowledge comes from analyzing a problem or business domain. It informs the code we develop and the tests we write. But, you run the tests afterwards, revealing more knowledge of the final deliverable after each iteration. This cycle continues as you layer more specific knowledge onto the current general knowledge.
The Kanban system in the software environment should not map handoffs between people. Instead, it should map activities and focus on the work and what happens to it. It’s the diametrical opposite of value stream mapping or Gemba walking in a physical operation.
Your Kanban systems and tools should encourage collaboration instead of reinforcing existing specializations or functional divisions.
“Dominance” is also crucial because though there may be multiple activities happening at a given instant, one of them is dominant for discovering new knowledge. Imagine testing a software function; at that moment, it’s “in test.” This testing activity is, therefore, the dominant activity for producing new knowledge. Tests may fail and lead to redesigning your analysis and a rewrite of your code. The failing test helped you to produce this knowledge.
The failing test provides the most up-to-date information on the finished product.
Step 6 – Discover classes of service
The set of policies describing handling something is known as a class of service. In the context of Kanban systems, however, the classes of services are definitions for the queuing discipline or priority of tickets.
Classes of services may also influence workflow, as if you have a specialist treat the item or test it to a specific quality level; classes of service can also provide information on scheduling or whether an item can exceed the Work In Progress limit.
Suppose your system has existing classes of service declared explicitly. In that case, you should capture them since the Kanban system design needs to accommodate them.
It’s more typical to look for implicit or hidden classes of service. For instance, if you have a policy that one type of work can disrupt another type, effectively interrupting the worker and thus prioritizing one type over another. These are known as implicit classes of service. We take a cursory look at these because we can then ask, “Did you mean for work items of type X to receive priority over items of type Y?”
Hidden classes of services are available where policy is absent. However, some items may receive a different treatment from others. The reason for this could be the delivery destination or the source of demand.
In typical scenarios, requests from upper management are given top priority, thereby avoiding the formal governance and selection process. What you do with these hidden classes is capture and make them explicit. The two possible scenarios then include:
- Designing the Kanban system to cope with the hidden clauses
- Exposure and transparency lead to a discussion to enable designing the system
Step 7 – Design the Kanban system
These four elements comprise the nucleus or core of your Kanban system:
- The Kanban system and its Kanban
- The ticket design
- The board design
- Adjustments to existing meetings and introduction of new ones to take care of Kanban Cadences or feedback loops
Designing the Kanban system requires having a workflow model for each type of work. We also need it for the following:
- The states of work based on dominant activities for discovering new knowledge
- The classes of work
It’s advisable to have Kanban limits in place for each state and allocations of Kanban over the spectrum of work item types and optional classes of service.
Ticket design in Kanban requires understanding the necessary information at each workflow level to help you decide the proper selection to pull an item to a consecutive activity state. The class of service, work item type, start date, due date where applicable, specialist workflow or processing requirements, and time blocked. Other considerations include the following:
- Elapsed time in a specific state
- Risks associated with a given item, say business, delivery, and technical, may affect whether you select, sequence, or schedule the item
On the other hand, board design requires you to understand the workflow for each type of work. It would help if you decided to have either one board for all work types and classes of service or at least two boards. Besides, allocating columns, rows, and ticket colors would be best. Here, you’ll consider the states in the workflow, work types, or collections of work types.
Generally speaking, the more deterministic the system is, the more complicated your workflow and board designs will be. That means a less deterministic, or more non-deterministic, workflow process requires a more straightforward board design, workflow model, and Kanban system, with a more complicated ticket design.
The Kanban method features a total of 7 Kanban Cadences meetings. All new implementations usually begin with a subset of these seven Cadences, while one common scenario is to repurpose existing meetings. In such cases, knowing which of the Kanban Cadences you’ll implement is always necessary. Also, besides the cadence of the meetings and reviews, you need to be clear on which meetings to repurpose.
Workshop exercises from the Kanban Management Professional training help design your Cadence meetings. Here are the steps to do this:
- Select the facilitator
- Select the frequency and duration of the meeting
- Identify the meeting attendees
- Determine what information each meeting attendee should come with
- Know what decisions you’ll make in those meetings, including critical metrics and reports to influence those decisions
Step 8 – Socialize the design and negotiate implementation
The STATIK method focuses on collaborative workshops for practical analysis and creating Kanban systems. It also places much value on boards.
Therefore, it’s common for every participant in the process to become a part of the changes and to own a stake in the design for implementation. Your primary approach to win support from your team and roll out is collaborative involvement in the design.
When choosing groups for STATIK workshops, selecting a cross-functional group involving customers and external stakeholders who may be decision-makers, influencers, or regulatory authorities is preferable. Team members need to be a part of delivery functions too. It ensures that internal and external people play a significant role in the design.
However, realize that there’s no way that every affected stakeholder can participate in the STATIK workshops. It would help if you circulated the workshop’s design input to involve a broader group in the design process. It’s an advanced aspect of Kanban implementation. Here are essential steps to implement this:
- Privately interface with individual stakeholders to capture their peculiarities.
- Remain humble when dealing with external stakeholders.
- Be clear that you understand that service delivery has yet to meet due expectations, and communicate your plan to improve things to provide better customer service.
- Explain that the changes are mainly internal, even though external stakeholders may notice how you interact with them.
- Show how your request submission, work for delivery approval & selection interface works. Some metrics should feature reporting and visibility that users can compare to the older system.
- Show how the new system will work, always explaining things from their perspective.
- Pay attention to stakeholder feedback as it’s critical to improving the system’s classes of service, Kanban limits (capacity allocations), board design, or reporting requirements. If you can, give your word that you’ll incorporate these changes on board.
- Work towards winning stakeholder approval for changes that meet their needs, assuming they implement them correctly.
- Redo your design to include all your learning from socializing.
- Meet with stakeholders to sign off that you’ve comprehensively integrated their concerns.
After Step 10 above, you’re ready to schedule a kick-off meeting to launch the Kanban initiative and introduce the changes. Always remember to take a stance of humility in these meetings. Your main objective is to improve your company’s service delivery to satisfy everyone involved relative to available resources. This last reason ensures that stakeholders accept inevitable compromises in the subsequent design.
It’s important to avoid fixing what already works well in the system. Changes should be minimal and only necessary for effective service delivery.
Those in your meetings may observe changes in how they interface with the group. However, their roles and responsibilities should remain intact. Each stakeholder should have the opportunity to access the design details relative to their work item types and required classes of service.
Where the design impacts roles and responsibilities, empathetically explain to those involved what the implications are for them and those they’ll work with.
Finally, be ready to clarify details on revisions to existing meetings to accommodate the Kanban Cadences—Enquire where the boards will be or what software to deploy with.
STATIK in Action: How to Use Kanban in Combination with Systems Thinking
People often ask, “How do I design my system if every board and Kanban system is unique?”
Because STATIK is a repeatable and human approach to using Kanban, it’s a proper solution to this conundrum. It helps you understand how a system behaves as a whole rather than through analysis of parts in isolation.
The way to apply the six basic steps of STATIK is iterative. Later stages can reveal new information, while it may be necessary to repeat earlier steps. Again, the steps are:
- Sources of Dissatisfaction
- Analyze Demand
- Analyze Capabilities
- Model the Workflow
- Identify Classes of Service
- Design the Kanban System
Building Kanban with a STATIK Workshop
A hands-on workshop approach is an effective technique to introduce Kanban to your team. Let’s take a look at an example of a STATIK workshop, it can last anywhere from a few hours to a full day.
Warmup
Before diving into the workshop, it’s important to create a positive and collaborative atmosphere. Begin with the warmup by encouraging the team members to share insights about their roles, responsibilities, and how they measure success. This helps to foster open communication and build a sense of shared purpose.
Goals
During the STATIK workshop, one of the key aspects is to establish the overall goals of your enterprise. Imagine where you want to be in the future and chart a path to success. Consider the following timeframes: 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years.
Stakeholder Map
Identify the key stakeholders, such as individuals or groups involved in your product or project, and gain a comprehensive understanding of their relationships. This visual representation helps pinpoint potential bottlenecks and areas where improvements can be made.
Sources of Unpredictability
Sources of unpredictability in a company’s process can arise from factors like changing requirements, limited resources, external dependencies, and communication gaps. These unpredictabilities can affect the timeline, resources, and overall success of the process. Identifying them will give you valuable insights for navigating the next steps of the workshop
Inventorization
Identifying and documenting all the tasks and responsibilities performed by individuals within the process helps create a clear understanding of the various components and activities involved. By documenting each person’s role and the specific tasks they perform, you gain a holistic view of the process and its intricacies. This information serves as a valuable foundation for analyzing and improving the workflow in the next steps.
Deliverables
The deliverables step can be creating a table that outlines the key elements of the process, including what tasks are performed, who they are performed for, who they are performed by, frequency, effectiveness, areas for improvement, and required turnaround time. It’s a valuable tool for identifying opportunities to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in the process.
Coming up with the Process
Use the information gathered from the workshop, including tasks, responsibilities, and insights, to design a logical and optimal process. This step involves analyzing the workshop data, identifying dependencies, streamlining workflows, and creating a well-defined process flow. The aim is to develop a structured and efficient process that can be implemented using tools like Jira boards or other project management systems.
Case studies of successful Kanban implementation with STATIK
A few organizations have effectively used Systems Thinking-based Kanban to optimize large-scale service delivery. Here, we review three of these companies, market leaders in their own right.
The world’s largest search company maintains massive data centers around the world. However, these data centers consume plenty of energy, contributing significantly to the global energy appetite. Global data center power consumption is 416 terawatt-hours(TWh) annually – precisely 3 percent of electrical energy generated worldwide.
However, this is giving the wise heads at Google a headache because it’s inevitable that they and other companies will build more data centers in the coming years. So, they have been buying abundant renewables to match their use of non-renewable energy to enable their long-term goal of eliminating their carbon footprint.
Google isn’t merely showing they have too much of investors’ money to play with. But, the company believes investing in a circular economy has long-term financial prospects. Kate Brandt, the company’s sustainability officer, highlights a predicted boost of $4.5 trillion in economic output by 2030 from cutting costs of buying new materials in favor of reusing and re-manufacturing existing ones.
Looking beyond a local problem with a global perspective enabled Google to predict the future and adequately prepare for it. You need this if your company will gain any long-term tangible advantage over competitors.
Tesco
UK retail giant Tesco appropriately leveraged its data to create a more compelling shopping experience. It enabled it to place “the right products on shelves at the right prices with the right promotions”, according to customer insight expert Clive Humby.
He highlighted the company’s commitment to utilizing data gained to drive the business while pinpointing the impact of its “test and learn” philosophy. The idea, he says, is to constantly “try out an idea” in around ten stores and, if it proves successful. Roll out elsewhere.
Humby admits that it’s impossible to eliminate risk, a lesson every business needs to learn. But your organization can learn about itself through systems thinking, gain new knowledge, and reinvent itself constantly.
Best Practices for Implementing Kanban with STATIK in Your Organization
Even if your company decides to pursue Agile transformation, it requires far more than circulating a memo instructing everyone to “go Agile.” There are more effective ways to bring about improvements in team performance. It’s especially important when implementing Kanban (and STATIK).
For a successful implementation of Kanban with STATIK in your organization, here are a few recommended best practices and a sprinkling of things to avoid:
- Visualize the workflow extensively.
- Allow teams to discover their problems and find their solutions. They’re more likely to follow through on resolving an issue they can see than one they aren’t sure even exists.
- Be patient with limiting WIP until you understand the flow at some level.
- Release burnup or cumulative flow diagrams to help your people know there’s progress. It helps because Kanban boards themselves are mere snapshots.
- Keep things simple! Simple enough to reveal what’s going on and complex enough to capture everything without complicating items or ideas. Visibility details help illuminate interesting areas more.
- Use constraints such as WIP limits as triggers to learn what to change, and tighten them up once you don’t encounter them any more.
- Set up explicit feedback loops, precisely flow management and retrospection meetings.
- It’s advisable to have your leaders and managers experience and understand flow to effectively communicate the ideas of flow behavior and improvement to their teams.
- Refrain from fighting resistance to new tools or physical boards. Using current tools, your best bet is to illustrate flow or its absence. More visibility may be necessary at some point, but by then, you’ll have the required buy-in for it.
- Get the required approval and support from management. Also, clarify the short-term benefits and alternate means of monitoring and control when using Kanban through STATIK.
- Successful implementation of Kanban through STATIK means you should be willing to work with pessimistic people to rein in the pessimistic ones. Helping cynical folks voice their usually valid concerns will point the team to pressing issues and more rewarding solutions.
- Remain open to making compromises. Even systems-based Kanban is only a means to an end. The goal is to solve a business problem, and there’s nothing like a pure Kanban implementation.
In delivering working software frequently, with a preference for the shorter timescale. Your team needs to be clear on the definition of “working software”, which defines that your software is ready. Software functionality is only complete when features pass all tests, and the end user can operate it with minimal hassle.
Integration testing, performance testing, and customer acceptance are other elements the finest software teams use as parameters or benchmarks in building software. Teams must at least go beyond the unit test level and test software at the system level to build functionally-complete software.
Tools and Resources for Supporting STATIK and Kanban Implementation
Using STATIK, it’s essential to use the right tools to design and model the Kanban system.
The way to do this is to migrate the workflow to a management tool, like Jira, Trello or Asana.
While physical boards are fantastic for introducing Kanban to your people, digital Kanban tools support convenience, save time, and offer many features that help you to explore Kanban through STATIK.
Kanban software helps visualize, organize, and manage work efficiently. Here are some benefits of using Kanban software:
- Cutting waste activities.
- Automation of work processes.
- Sound predictions from historical data.
- Focusing on work that offers your customers real value.
- Managing remote teams easily, with tools to track and analyse your teams’ workflow.
How to choose the right Kanban tool?
You need answers to some questions to give you an idea of the requirements for choosing the right Kanban software to accommodate systems thinking in your organization.
- Does the software design permit you to visualize your workflow enough for your organization?
- Is it flexible enough to allow you to customize your workflows to suit you?
- Does the tool offer multiple ways to limit the work in progress? -Constant limit (CONWIP), Personal WIP limits, and WIP limits per cell.
- Does the software have the capacity to manage the flow? – Various visualizations, including work, blockers, dependencies, and deadlines.
- Does the tool offer a straightforward way to visualize your process policies?
- How does the software implement feedback loops? – @mentions, comments, and email integrations
- Does it let users create dashboards with customizable layouts and display reports using critical flow and performance metrics from various boards?
- Does the tool offer workflow analytics capabilities that help you analyze the performance of your workflow, optimize process efficiency, and support continuous improvement? Examples include charts, cumulative flow diagrams, histograms, and Monte Carlo simulations.
- Does the software let you log or track time spent on tasks and projects for individuals and teams in a way that enables you to improve on capacity planning?
The best software for Kanban
Here’s a short round-up of some of the most comprehensive Kanban software tools and resources:
- Jira Software
- Asana
- Flow-e
- Proofhub
- Smartsheet
- Trello
These software allow you to store information in one central location. They also offer the benefit of real-time status updates and easy access to remote team members. Regarding security, they offer role-based access, granting users specific rights with appropriate restrictions on the board.
Digital Kanban software also offers flow analytics, including Kanban metrics and cycle times. They integrate well with other tools, helping you achieve even more while supporting your most important business rules.
The Takeaway
Your organization constantly caters to multiple systems to help you achieve specific objectives. Regardless of the size of each team, they’re all part of a more extensive system working in concert to achieve clear goals.
An internalized systems approach helps you to appreciate the interconnected dynamics of internal and external systems, revealing solutions to problems and showing you better ways to run your operations.