Manage Kanban Workflow

Kanban system members actively manage their workflow. Trained Kanban experts and project managers can support that shared work; these are not mandatory Kanban roles.

It's essential to be able to limit the number of Kanban cards located at specific steps of Kanban workflow. Yet, that’s not enough to enable the flow.

Definition: Management of Kanban Workflow

All tasks performed to enable or improve the Kanban workflow can be defined as activities to manage Kanban workflows.

Some of these activities are:

• Kanban cards are pulled to a step of a workflow when explicit WIP controls signal capacity after work is completed or otherwise leaves that part of the workflow.
• Kanban cards are never left to gain high work item ages without being processed by the Kanban team.
• The Kanban team addresses queues of blocked cards proactively and follows explicit policies when priorities need to change.
• The Kanban team takes service level expectations (SLEs) seriously as probabilistic forecasts and makes timely decisions while they do the work to proactively manage their workflow.
• Kanban team tracks their metrics, makes them transparent to their upstream, and downstream work centers as well. In this way, valuable feedback can be collected from surrounding teams whose workflows are interrelated to the workflow of the Kanban team.
• Work In Progress (WIP) Limits can be inspected and adjusted collaboratively by the people responsible for the service, including relevant experts, project managers, and stakeholders. Any accepted exceptions should be explicit.