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How Do You Start With Kanban? Step-by-Step Guide In 6 Steps

Now the next logical question in your mind might be how you can get started with Kanban. Here is a quick recipe.

Step-1: Conduct A Kanban Workshop

Talk to your team first. Highlight problems and pain points your team is dealing with and how Kanban can help you out.

Before anyone else, you need buy-in from your own team members.

Step-2: Address Stakeholders

Talk to your stakeholders. Make the reasons for change clear to them. Let them build a clear vision about how this change would impact their collaboration with your team and how those changes could benefit them. Remember, no vision means no action and trust on their part.

Comfort your stakeholders that this would be a no-strings-attached experiment in the first place to see if Kanban can be a good fit for the organization.

Step-3: Begin With What You Do Now

Avoid making massive changes and big bangs with particular ways you deliver your work. If you use specific tools to prepare and deliver your information work, stick to these while you're at the early stages of your Kanban adoption.

Don't make multiple changes for the sake of simplicity and not clouding the results of your Kanban adoption. Avoid multiple variables changing simultaneously.

Follow your routine and start using the Kanban framework as your scheduling, tracking, and monitoring tool

Step-4: Target Incremental Change With Kanban

All other changes, great ideas for improvement, and optimization of your performance come one step at a time. Your first goal is to establish and stabilize effective Work In Progress (WIP) controls for each step of your workflow. That will ultimately enable you to build, tune, and verify your Kanban Service Level Expectations (SLEs). Thus, your stakeholders will have a clear view of when they should expect deliverables from your Kanban team for a given requirement.

Once this is accomplished, you can experiment with other dimensions of your delivery process, tools, and techniques to further optimize and improve the performance of your Kanban team.

Step-5: Respect The Current Roles and Responsibilities

You need to show the same care to the roles and responsibilities of your people as you show to the processes. Especially at the early stages of your Kanban adoption, avoid moving and shifting roles and responsibilities of your Kanban team members. Let them first learn and digest the new way of executing their projects, while they're still doing what they used to do day-to-day before Kanban adoption.

As the team learns, proposed changes to roles and responsibilities can be discussed and agreed to honor desired WIP Limits and Kanban Service Level Expectations (SLEs).

Step-6: Motivate Acts of Leadership With Kanban At All Levels

Help your Kanban team members own their successes, but also their failures. Make them allies of business and your business goals. Please encourage them to learn from, teach, and inspire each other. Last but not least, don't ignore the importance of getting buy-in from your own leadership, which will ultimately play a decent role in making or breaking your successful Kanban initiative.