Kanban is a method of managing workflow and organizational evolution, which acts in an experimental and evolutionary way, considering the behavioral and psychological issues involved in change management.

Kanban practices

To achieve this, Kanban suggests 6 practices: "visualize"; "limit work in progress" (WiP); "manage flow"; "make policies explicit"; "implement feedback loops"; and "improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally".

The first one, Visualize, is extremely important for the Kanban success and influences all the others, as we will see below.

The first practice

This practice is first applied to the workflow. It is necessary to explicit the stages through which a demand goes so that value is delivered to the customer in the end. It is not rare that the actual process is different than its design, so the process mapping should be done with the temas who operate it. This is of enormous value because, if what is being done is not happening as planned, there is a reason.

It is frequent tnat the theory does not reflect or fit the reality. It is critical to clearly understand the real process and all its nuances as the first step of this process. Therefore, hold back the urge to “order” the process to return to what was designed. Remember the first principle of change management: start with what you do today (not with what you imagine should be done). Understand the reasons for this difference. It is likely that very rich information will emerge from this understanding.

What else should we look at

In addition to the flow, we also visualize the work in progress (WIP), that is, those that are following this path. This makes it easy to see which stages are congested (bottleneck) and the ones which have capacity to absorb more, and start assessing possibilites to improve the flow, thus driving more agility and predictability of deliveries.

It is also important to visualize everything that adds to the flow, such as the WiP limits for each step, blocks, policies, cadences, metrics, etc.

Understand that, with just this first practice, we can already obtain information to make important decisions, protect the team against abuse of capacity, resolve bottlenecks and blockages, promote transparency and improve services, which demonstrates how powerful the act of visualization is and that it makes all the difference for change management, continuous improvement and organizational evolution.