Work In Progress (WIP) sometimes also referred to as Work in Process refers to any work within a business process which has been started but is not yet complete. It is fairly obvious that any work only offers value to a company or its customers once it has been completed. With this in mind, it is a no-brainer that limiting the WIP within a team or system should lead to increased value. While the idea is, on the face of it, simple enough to understand, few work teams place the necessary emphasis on limiting of WIP or utilize methods of controlling WIP that simply do not work.

Why Is It Important To Manage WIP?

While most people like to believe that they are good at multitasking, the reality is that working on multiple things at the same time is less effective than placing focus on one task at a time. Also, when someone works on several tasks at the same time, they will need to jump from task to task often, resulting in a loss of productivity whenever they take time to refocus on the previous task.

Placing a limit on the work that can be handled by one worker or team at a time will prevent workers from starting new tasks when they still have unfinished tasks. Instead of having people start work on a new task if their current task is blocked or too difficult, the WIP limit will force them to examine why the current task is not moving forward. By establishing the reasons, they can then focus on finding a solution and finishing the task to allow more work to come in and resume the flow of work.

Getting Started With Management of WIP

Among the key principles followed by teams working within the Agile methodology is focusing on making continuous improvements to processes. This continuous improvement is often the result of team members inspecting processes, experimenting with them and then adapting.

Managing WIP for a team is no different. When the team commences on any project, especially without much experience in Agile, managing work in progress and setting up of WIP limits can be a somewhat tricky affair. If WIP limits are made too stringent at the start, people start to get worried, frustrated or even discouraged. On the other hand, if the limit is too big, people will start to work on to many tasks concurrently, defeating the purpose of managing WIP in the first place.

To start managing WIP in business effectively, teams need to pick limits that they feel comfortable with at the start and commit to them for a given period of time. At the end of this period, the team can meet to discuss the efficiency and effectiveness of their initial approach. They may then decide if it is necessary to revisit the WIP limits they set. In time, and with maturity of the team, the WIP limits will naturally get smaller.

Use of the Kanban System

In the modern workplace, it often feels that each employee’s to-do list on a day-to-day basis is a mile long. With people having so many tasks in their work queues, it is very tempting to jump from task to task while attempting to tick off as many work items as possible off the list. However, when someone dives into new tasks before they have had a chance to complete their previous work, it can result in the employee getting overwhelmed by a deluge of work, lengthening the lead times for the projects they are working on. In this case, a kanban board system could prove to be an invaluable tool to help manage WIP.

The kanban board (roughly translated from Japanese to mean card you can see’) offers a simplified way for workers to visualize their workflows and stem the chaos which may cloud busy projects. This solution works in management of work in progress by making it simpler for team members to graphically visualize project workflow in one place, offering convenience and transparency.

Conclusion

While it is simple enough to understand WIP limits, teams will all too often misuse or ignore them. No matter the process improvement method used Lean, Agile, Waterfall or any other process if individuals or teams can focus on completing a task at a time and move on to the next, more will get done faster.

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When Not to Use Kanban Swim Lanes

Choosing the best tool for a particular task is not always easy, and we are often biased towards the wrong solution. This is especially true when we consider our positive bias towards complexity. A more complex tool might often look more appealing just on the merit of the fact that it supposedly has more features. Unfortunately, we often fail to realize that redundant features are almost always a hindrance. In Lean, we call this Overprocessing.

Such is the case with Kanban swim lanes. Many of us view them as a bonus and a feature, without taking into account that one of Kanban’s main advantages is its simplicity. This means that simplicity should be sacrificed only when this leads to a real benefit.

Undeniably, using swim lanes on your Kanban board might often be quite beneficial. After all, the concept was developed to add value, depth and utility when needed, and there are many implementations that are extremely successful. But the fact that we have the option to use swim lanes doesn’t mean that we should.

So here are a few cases when using swim lanes would actually be the wrong thing to do:

Each Team Member Has Their Own Swim Lane

Broadly speaking, having a separate Kanban swim lane for each team member defies the purpose of having a Kanban board altogether.

First of all, a Kanban board is supposed to simplify communication and teamwork. Separating each individual team member into their own swim lane inhibits collaboration on both a psychological and a practical level. First of all, in any industry that might benefit from having a Kanban board, there will often be tasks that are handled by more than one individual. Per-person swim lanes make this impossible to visualize, so the task ends up with one individual, possibly creating tension while making the board less informative and useful. On top of this set of practical problems, having this setup will lead to individualism, and most team members will start caring about their own tasks and success, instead of fighting for the team.

Secondly, individual swim lanes per team member usually destroy the concept of WIP limitations. When the allowed number of tasks in the Work in Progress column is lower than the number of team members, people are going to have to work together, collaborate and share experience. In this way, everybody will have to view the team as a unit, and would be compelled to act in the team’s best interests, not their own.

Swim Lanes Represent Different Phases

The main purpose of a Kanban board is to visualize the process in question in a comprehensive way. Each task should start on one side, and move through all the steps in the process, so it can reach completion on the other side. Swim lanes are a bit dangerous, because they allow for forks in the road, and often get misused. One of the most common mistakes while implementing them is having different phases of the same process represented as different swim lanes.

A tell-tale sign of this problem is when tasks reach the end of one swim lane, and then instead of going to the “Done” column, they start their journey all over again in a different swim lane. For instance, a software development company might have a Kanban board with the standard three columns To Do, Doing, and Done, and three swim lanes Design, Development and Testing. Obviously, each task will start in the Design swim lane, and then move through Development and then Testing before it lands in the Done column.

This will obviously create problems and is not a good way to visualize the flow. Swim lanes should not be sequential but parallel, and if they aren’t, they are just obscuring the big picture. Our development company example needs to expand the number of columns to properly represent the sequential nature of design, development and testing, and eliminate the pointless swim lanes from their Kanban board.

Swim Lanes Don’t Need to Be on the Same Kanban Board

A Kanban board should be practical and easy to use, so the larger a board gets, the more impractical it can become. When trying to implement a Kanban board in a large or diverse organization, it can become too cumbersome. That often gets handled by adding more and more swim lanes for different teams. That can sometimes benefit the organization by making the big picture universally visible, but most of the time, it only creates clutter. This happens when each swim lane actually represents a distinctly different process handled by a different team. If this is the case, it might often be a much better idea to create multiple Kanban boards for the different parts of the organization.

Generally speaking, a board that attempts to encompass disparate processes is unlikely to do a very efficient job. If there isn’t a good reason to keep the processes together on the same board, separating them will allow each department to use their own board with a heightened level of efficiency. In this way, each Kanban board can be customized to better represent each team’s workflow. This will lead to faster process improvement and tighter collaboration. If the organization still requires interdepartmental communication and coordination, an additional Kanban board can be created to handle that task explicitly.

So Should You Use Swim Lanes?

In the end, each organization is different, and the Kanban boards they implement should reflect their specific needs and workflows. While the recommendations or warnings in this article should help you avoid overusing Kanban swim lanes, the final decision should be based on achieving the best results in your specific situation. Just make sure you are not using swim lanes from the sake of complexity, and implement them only when they are adding real value to your Kanban implementation.

Learn more about kanban boards >>>

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Simple Kanban Systems to Setup at Home

Kanban and Kanban boards have proven themselves to be both efficient and effective in the business sphere, but you don’t have to be a business to take advantage of Kanban and its principles. There is a wide variety of applications for personal Kanban, and you can use this list of ideas at home as inspiration, to make your home more organized, efficient and fun.

The Personal Kanban Board

The personal kanban board is probably the simplest and most popular application of Kanban on a personal level. It’s a simple Kanban board with just 3 columns To Do’, Doing’ and Done’. It is really up to you if you want to use a digital solution to work with your personal Kanban board online, or if you’d rather have a physical board on the wall of your study or bedroom at home.

Some free electronic kanban tools are Kanban Tool, Trello and Cardsmith

Either way, this simple yet powerful visualization tool will allow you to handle your personal tasks in a more organized way, allowing you to increase your personal productivity. Just don’t forget to implement a limit on the Work in Progress allowed in the Doing’ column, so you can stay focused and remain efficient.

Learn more about Kanban boards >>>

A Kanban-Based Chore Board

No matter if you are living with your family, some friends, roommates, or even by yourself, creating a dedicated Kanban board for the household chores might save a lot of time (and often prevent a lot arguments). When you are living with people, it’s often harder to divide the tasks, and people might feel like they are doing more than the rest, even when that is not the case. Making the list of chores, and who is doing what, visible to everybody allows everyone to understand their own part, and to see that others are putting in an effort as well.

Additionally, explicit Kanban rules might be used to keep each person from having to do too much, while everything gets done on time. You can also create individual swim lanes for each person in the household, or use additional stickers to signify who is taking care of which task.

Kanban Inventory Management for Your Fridge and Pantry

The first Kanban implementation in Toyota didn’t really include a central visual Kanban board, but an integrated system that utilized signal cards that allowed demand to pull production. An extremely simplified version of that can actually make the creation of a grocery list an effortless and virtually automatic process. The idea is actually very simple, and the only thing you need to do is create a Kanban card for each product that you use on regular basis.

When you buy groceries, you stock them in your fridge or pantry, together with their respective Kanban cards. While you keep consuming the items, you take the cards of the items that have run out, and stick them outside your fridge with magnets. This will provide you with a very clear visual indication of when you are running out, and what you are running out of. In this way, the system will be able to alert you when you need to go shopping in a straight-forward visual way. Before you leave, just take out your smartphone, and take a picture of your fridge, and you have a ready-made grocery list in less than 2 seconds. Or you can use paper cards, and when you run out of the item, remove the card for that item (usually taped to the product), and put them into a basket, then take the cards to the store with you. Each card should contain the name of the product, brand, size, and any other pertinent information (flavor, ingredients, etc). This worked really well for me personally, when trying to manage dog food. I setup a min-max level, so when I was down to 3 cans of dog food, I had a card on the 3rd can that told me to buy 6 more cans (min of 3, max of 9).

Manage Your Children as a Team

Being a parent means that you have to teach your children to be independent, organized and responsible, while still being in control, and providing them stewardship and guidance. Striking the right balance between a hands-on and a hands-off approach can be a very difficult task, and Kanban can be a tool to help you achieve that.

You can create a dedicated Kanban board for your children and the tasks they have. It might include house chores, schoolwork, their hobbies, playtime and important appointments and tasks. You can have explicit rules and WIP limitations to make sure they cannot get to playtime before they have completed their schoolwork. Having a visual board will allow you to exercise control and supervision, without robbing your children of a sense of independence. This also teaches them to prioritize and organize on their own.

Event Management

You can also use personal Kanban to manage larger events you might have coming up. As Kanban is an effective and efficient way to manage large workloads, it can be extremely helpful when planning weddings, anniversaries or other large events that are more than a simple party.

If we look at a wedding as an example, we’ll see that there is a myriad of different tasks to be handled by a variety of people. While most of the work usually weights on the bride’s shoulders, there are always a lot of other people involved, and all of their efforts need to be coordinated. As the huge workload of organizing a wedding can be quite stressful, having a nice Kanban board to make everything organized can alleviate some of that pain. It will also make communication between everybody involved much easier, so more will get done, and fewer tasks will fall through the cracks.

Be Creative

As you can clearly see by all the ideas above, personal Kanban has more than one way to help you live a better life, and there are so much more examples that we haven’t mentioned. Everybody can find their own unique way to implement it at home. You can be as creative as you’d like, as the Kanban approach is quite flexible, and can be applied to everything we do.

How have you applied Kanban in your personal life? Add your comments below…

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The Utility of Using Kanban Swim Lanes

Kanban is a great tool to visualize your business’ workflow, but the typical column-only configuration might sometimes lack the desired depth, depending on your circumstances. Kanban is designed to be efficient, and to force teams to prioritize and concentrate their efforts on what would have real impact. Its simple philosophy of limiting the number of tasks that can be in the Work in Progress’ (WIP) column might not be perfectly suited for all situations.

In all those situations where you are managing a larger team, or a team that needs to be flexible and accountable in more way, you can introduce Kanban swim lanes. Besides the vertical classification of tasks depending on the stage, you can use horizontal rows to divide tasks in different flows, depending on different characteristics. This allows for more complex WIP rules, and for a more detailed and thus meaningful and useful workflow visualization.

Types of Swim Lanes

As swim lanes can be separated in a variety of ways, they come in a variety of flavors to suit a wide variety of organizations and work. It’s important to note that swim lanes should represent parts of the process that run in parallel. If a tasks goes through one swim lane, and then goes back to go through another, swim lanes have not been properly implemented. Your board probably needs additional columns instead of your current swim lanes.

The most common criteria to separate swim lanes are the following:

1. Priority
2. Departments or teams or individuals
3. Features or user stories

Swim Lanes Based on Priority

Adding different swim lanes for tasks, with different levels of urgency, makes prioritization clearer and more effective. In this way, what is important is visually represented by the lane it has been positioned in. It also means that urgent tasks can always take priority, and overtake less urgent ones. Still, the management needs to be careful not to make the WIP limit insignificant through such implementation.

Swim Lanes Based on Departments or Teams or Individuals

When Kanban is used by organizations that are large enough to have different department or teams, it makes sense for each of them to get their own swim lane with its own WIP limit. Having a single maximum number of active tasks for the whole organization is impractical, and not that useful. Allowing each department to have its own swim lane allows management to organize their own work independently enough, while still being aware of the big picture, and what their colleagues from other departments are working on. For smaller groups, the swim lanes may represent individuals on a team.

Swim Lanes Based on Features or User Stories

Sometimes the most useful way to implement swim lanes is to separate them based on different facets of the product or service. While individual team members might not be associated with a single feature or user story, parallel progress on all of them might be important, so the organization might decide to visualize that, and also making it a part of the rules. This type of separation ensures that all features will be worked on, and none will be neglected, since each one gets their own WIP quota.

Additional Customization

To implement swim lanes to their full potential, you should realize that a swim lane doesn’t need to cover all columns, and there can be different types of swim lanes from different stages of the process. This adds immense flexibility, and might allow for very complex Kanban boards that still offer a high level of utility and comprehensiveness.

Additionally, many Kanban implementations might include a separate swim lane for repeatable tasks that need to be performed routinely. This allows adds more clarity to what is the current temporary work that needs to be completed, and what is part of the regular supporting process.  This makes things more intuitive, and makes WIP limits more meaningful.

Read more about Kanbans >>>

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What Are the Principles of Kanban and Why Do They Work?

Kanban is both one of the simplest and most efficient tools to manage workflow in a visual way. It’s one of the important tools used in more complex process improvement methodologies (such as Lean), and its wide-spread adoption is a testament to its flexibility, utility and effectiveness. Kanban is based on a few core principles that ensure successful implementation at scales ranging from the individual to organizations with multiple departments and teams that need to be coordinated.

Let’s explore the 4 core principles that the Kanban approach is based on, and why following them is advantageous.

1.     Visualize

Our brains are wired in such a way that processing visual information is what we are best at. For instance, looking at charts or graphs gives us a much better understanding of a large set of numbers than looking at the raw data ever could. Kanban takes this visual approach and applies it to the workflow.

In Kanban, each task and each step of the process has a clear visual representation that also includes the most vital information. This is an extremely efficient way to make the current state of affairs in an organization visible and understandable by all. Everybody can infer what they need just by a quick glance at the Kanban board, and all workflow impediments like blockers or bottlenecks become obvious right away. This is extremely beneficial by making communication within the team easier and more efficient, and by uncovering problematic areas that need to be fixed.

2.     Limit the Work in Progress

One of the few rules that Kanban imposes is limiting the number of pieces of work that can be worked on at any given moment. The actual limitation depends on those that are managing the particular Kanban implementation, but the simple act of imposing a limit is quite advantageous.

This limit fosters focus and forces proper prioritization. This allows an organization to be efficient in how it utilizes its workforce. Additionally, it eliminates decision paralysis, as it doesn’t allow individual team members or managers to be destabilized by the sheer amount of tasks that have piled up, and prevents the common mistake of trying to do too much all at once. On top of this, having a WIP limitation also ensures that each piece of work will go through the workflow process as quickly as possible, which helps productivity.

3.     Focus on the Flow

Despite the fact that this can be partially viewed as a function of the first two principles, focusing on the actual workflow is a core value engrained into Kanban as a tool. It should be viewed as an integral part of its proper implementation. Kanban takes the workflow to the forefront of the team’s understanding of their job, and how their organization functions. While Kanban is being used to manage how individual pieces of work are handled as part of the larger process framework, data about what is going on is collected, so the flow can be described and understood using a system of clear metrics. This understanding allows the organization to gain deeper knowledge about its own inner workings, and sets the stage for the last principle

4.     Continuous Improvement

Kanbans have a lot of benefits in the day-to-day operation and management of a team or an organization. It puts you in a position where continuous improvement can be achieved and can become part of the company culture. By making sure everything is visual, and by focusing on the flow and collecting data about the performance of the system over time, Kanban allows improvement opportunities to be identified, and taken advantage of on a regular basis. As this process is repeated over and over again, even the smallest of improvements can start to affect the overall performance of the organization in a positive way. This leads to ever increasing productivity, efficiency and thus competitiveness.

Read more about Kanbans >>>

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Using Kanban in Your Personal Life

Kanban is a workflow visualization tool that has proven itself to be extremely valuable in the business environment as a way to manage processes of all sorts. It’s simple yet powerful, and it makes a lot of vital information both evident and easily accessible for whole teams, bolstering productivity and process optimization.

But Kanban’s potential is not limited to the fields of business and management. It can be a tool that everyone could use in their personal life to efficiently manage all of their tasks, and to increase their own personal productivity. At its core, Kanban is just an organized approach to treating your list of to-dos. What makes it great and useful is its simplicity that doesn’t diminish its power or effectiveness.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a method that is used to create a Kanban board. It’s usually a whiteboard, but it can be done on a large piece of paper or through specialized software, or even on MS Excel. Kanban has a few columns that signify different stages a task might be at, starting from the most basic To Do’ state, and ending with the Done’ state. The simplest version of Kanban has just one column in between, which is traditionally labeled Doing’, but there is no limit on the number of columns that can be used, so Kanban boards can get quite complex if need be. Tasks are usually written down on sticky notes, and they are physically moved from column to column when they are at different stages of the task completion process. The idea is to quickly move each sticky from one end of the board to the other end, which means your “customer” gets what they want quickly.

Learn more about Kanban boards here >>>

What Is Personal Kanban?

There are two main aspects of Kanban that make it quite suitable for anybody to apply in their personal life:

1.      Visualization

Kanban is an extremely visual method, which is very helpful for the visual creatures that we are. One of the keys to personal productivity is the ability to get organized without wasting any time. There are many people that use just a simple to-do list on a piece of paper or even people that don’t write down their tasks and expect to hold it all in their heads. Most of them spend a lot of time and effort to decide what they need to do next, what has been done and what hasn’t, and making sure they are not forgetting anything. It’s really easy for it all to become a mess Having a Kanban board with all your tasks helps solve that problem. It presents all of the tasks you have and their progress in an easy to comprehend visual form. When you implement Kanban in your life, you will probably get used to it quickly, as being able to access all the information about the tasks you have at hand at a glance is virtually addictive.

2.      Limited Work in Progress

What leads to a lot of busy people struggling with managing their personal tasks is the fact that they try to do too much all at one. One of the most important principles of Kanban is the limits that you need to impose on the “work in progress” (WIP). You need to decide on a number of tasks that you will allow yourself to be active on at any given time, and adhering to this rule will help you stay focused and avoid stress. It doesn’t sound like a big thing, but it forces proper prioritization, and this has immense results on personal productivity. When you worry about everything all at once, your mind becomes highly ineffective, and this drains a lot of energy. But when you have a Kanban board, you can relax and concentrate on the task at hand without worrying about everything else you have to do everything is clear and manageable. All those items you need to do in the future should be stored in the backlog (‘To Do’ column), but only active projects and tasks are in the ‘Doing’ or WIP column. Start by limiting your WIP to 3 tasks, and see how that works for you. You can always move tasks back to the ‘To Do’ stage if something new comes up, but don’t go over 3 active tasks, or the system will not work.

Where to Start?

Kanban is not a complex system that needs a lot of preparation for. All you need is a few sticky notes and a surface to divide into columns and start sticking them on. It doesn’t require any additional expertise, so you can start from the most basic three-column board, and move up from there. Alternatively, you could look into the many desktop, web or mobile Kanban applications available and give them a go. We suggest you start using Kanbans by hand, instead of electronic solutions, so you learn the methodology and practice it first. In the end, the most important thing is just to start and to stay consistent, and you will start completing tasks more quickly, and not feeling overwhelmed.

Want to learn more about applying Lean to your personal life? Check out the book “A Factory of One” by Dan Markovitz

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