Real-World Kanban

How We Got Started

The team’s Kanban journey started because the managers wanted a new way for the team to handle its workload. At first, the managers looked at Lean for office work, but that didn’t quite fit. The managers observed how IT used a Kanban board and decided to give it a try. At the time, I had no prior experience using Kanban outside of IT, but we decided it was worth a try.

Because team members were self-organizing, focused on their specific tasks, and expected to take end-to-end responsibility for their work, getting the full picture for the entire team was hard. This was a problem for management, which needed to track certain types of demand. Each demand type had explicit customer expectations associated with it, so it was important ...