The Kanban Guide

July 2020

© 2019–2020 Orderly Disruption Limited, Daniel S. Vacanti, Inc.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Purpose of the Kanban Guide

This guide contains the minimum set of rules for Kanban.
“Kanban” here refers specifically to the holistic set of concepts contained in this guide.

By reducing Kanban to its essentials, this guide aims to serve as a unifying reference.
The strategy builds on Kanban fundamentals and can accommodate a broad range of value delivery and organisational challenges.

Definition of Kanban

Kanban is a strategy for optimising the flow of value through a process using a visual, pull-based system.

Value can be defined in terms of customer, end-user, organisation, or environment.

Core Practices:

1. Defining and visualising a workflow
2. Actively managing items in a workflow
3. Improving a workflow

Collectively, these define a Kanban system, and participants are Kanban system members.

Why Use Kanban?

Flow is the movement of potential value through a system.
Kanban’s goal is to optimise value by optimising flow, which means balancing:

• Effectiveness – Deliver what customers want, when they want it
• Efficiency – Use economic resources optimally
• Predictability – Forecast delivery accurately

Kanban helps teams ask the right questions sooner, and works across industries like finance, healthcare, marketing, and software.

Kanban Theory

Kanban is rooted in:

• Systems thinking
• Lean principles
• Queuing theory (batch size, queue size)
• Variability and quality control

These principles are shared with many value-oriented frameworks.
Kanban complements and enhances other delivery techniques.

Kanban Practices

Defining and Visualizing the Workflow

Definition of Workflow (DoW) includes:

• What the work items are
• Start and finish points
• Workflow states (work in progress, or WIP)
• How WIP is controlled
• Policies for how items move through the workflow
• Service Level Expectation (SLE) for time from start to finish

Kanban Board: A visual representation of the DoW.
Visualisation helps process knowledge and drive improvement.

Actively Managing Items in a Workflow

Forms of active management:

• Controlling WIP
• Avoiding queues
• Managing item ageing via SLE
• Unblocking work

This can be informal or regular. Daily meetings are optional.

Controlling Work in Progress

• Use WIP limits (numbers or tokens/slots)
• WIP limits can apply to a single state or multiple grouped areas
• This creates a pull system: new work is only pulled when capacity exists
• Exceeding WIP should be rare and explicit in the DoW

Service Level Expectation (SLE)

• Forecast of item completion time (e.g., “85% within 8 days”)
• Based on historical cycle time, or a best guess initially
• Should be visualised on the Kanban board

Improving the Workflow

Teams continuously improve by:

• Adjusting the DoW based on visualisation and flow metrics
• Making changes as needed, not only during formal events
• Making both small and large improvements as context requires

Kanban Measures

Minimum required flow metrics:

• WIP: Work started but not yet finished
• Throughput: Number of items finished per unit time
• Work Item Age: Time since start for an unfinished item
• Cycle Time: Time from start to finish for a work item

These metrics only matter if they inform Kanban practices.
Visualisation (e.g., charts) is recommended.
Additional context-specific metrics are also encouraged.

Endnote

Kanban’s practices and measures are immutable.
Partial implementation is not Kanban.
Additional principles, methods, or techniques can be added, but the core must remain intact.

History of Kanban

Origins:

• Toyota Production System
• Taiichi Ohno, W. Edwards Deming
• Adapted for knowledge work at Corbis (2006)
• Evolved by a diverse global community

Acknowledgments

Thanks to contributors including:

• Yuval Yeret, Steve Porter
• Emily Coleman
• Ryan Ripley, Todd Miller
• Julia Wester, Colleen Johnson, Jose Casal, Jean-Paul Bayley
• Dave West, Eric Naiburg
• Deborah Zanke

License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .