Problems Without Kanban

Here in this section, we want to briefly touch on typical challenges of an information work ecosystem that doesn't take the benefits of the Kanban framework.

• A negligent employee can be rewarded for speed, while he or she is causing expensive impediments due to incomplete deliverables.
• Teams participate in an extreme number of meetings concerning planning and processes.
• Delivery dates shift as requirements change; projects are rescheduled continuously, which requires extra planning and meetings.
• Quality goes unchecked for weeks or months, which produces a large volume of rework to fulfill even minimum quality expectations from stakeholders.
• Teams spend substantial time doing tasks that are unrelated to providing value to their clients.
• Problems age for months, if not years, before they are discovered, understood, and rectified.

These are only a few of the downward spirals and vicious cycles that businesses and professionals can experience.

The historical Gartner estimate cited in this book is that companies worldwide waste about 600 billion USD annually on non-budgeted and non-scheduled IT maintenance work to keep revenue-generating IT systems up and running.

To express this number with digits to see what it looks like: $600,000,000,000.-

As it should be apparent to you by now, this level of waste in a highly cognitive field such as information work and information technology is not easy to grasp.

That is a great challenge to tackle. Kanban has some answers for some organizations, maybe for your organization too.

Given that, your organization is ready to explore, learn, and change transparently.