[MUSIC] What is Kanban? Kanban means sign board or billboard in Japanese. It is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing. Kanban uses high level planning up front and then detailed planning as you go. Kanban also uses progressive elaboration. Do you remember progressive elaboration? Let's do a quick test of what you recall. a, progressive elaboration is an approach to detailing the project plan, where planning is completed in an iterative and on-going manner. Or b, progressive elaboration is an approach to creating an estimate at the start of the project and keeping that estimate in place as the project progresses. What do you think? The correct answer is a. Progressive elaboration is an approach to detailing the project plan, where planning is completed in an iterative and on-going manner. Kanban also relies on four key concepts. The value stream, visualization, flow, and limiting work in process or WIP. If Kanban means sign board and visualization is an important part of it, then you know that there's a graphic element to how you perform and manage your project work. A Kanban board gives you a visual of what's happening with the work. As you moved to the project you can see information such as team member capacity to handle work, resource assignments, top priority items, bottlenecks, and dependencies that exists among the work tasks. The Kanban board helps you to visualize the work flow. Cards and columns are used to show how the work progresses through the system. Next, let's consider flow. Kanban helps to identify improvements in your work process by mapping out how the work flows or how the value flows through the system. So you can identify areas with bottlenecks or other issues. In Kanban, we say the work flows through the value stream. The idea is to process work in small chunks. You also want what we call a reduced cycle time. Reduced cycle time means not having large gaps of time between value streams. This leads us to limiting work in process or WIP. You can probably reduce waste in your system. The term waste is commonly used in Kanban and other processes such as Kaizen. Kazan is another Japanese term and system which means continuous improvement. The idea is that if people are working on too many things at once, there's a bit of waste in terms of their time and attention. The fact that working on too many things at once usually takes longer and can lead to defects. It's better to have resources focus on one particular item. We have focused on the key concepts. Let's look at an example. This is a picture of a working Kanban board. Notice that it is not in any way high tech. Yes, you can buy software to create your boards and your flow, but you don't have to. This board is the visualization of the project. Now, in this example, the handwriting is a bit messy. But you can see the value stream across the top starting with define and the peer review docs. And then build scripts, and then formal IT. And in most of these areas, you see cards. These cards represent work. Do you see how some of those cards have colorful spots in the lower right hand corner? Those colorful spots tie to resources. Look at the colorful circles on the left hand side of the board. It's hard to read the name sure, but each of those circles represent a resource. The work flows from one value stream to another. When a value stream can handle more work, then we pull the work from the backlog area and into the flow. And it begins to go through the value stream. But remember, we purposefully limit our work in process. You can really get a lot of value from what appears to be a simple process for managing your work. Now before you go, what were the four concepts that Kanban relies on? What is A, the value add, visualization, flow, limiting work in process? Was it B, the value stream, visualization, flow, limiting work in process? How about C, the work stream value depiction, flow, limiting work in process? Or maybe D, the value add, visualization, flow, maximizing work in process? The correct answer is B. The value stream, visualization, flow, and limiting work in process or WIP. Now you got it.
