Visualize Your Workflow With Kanban

Let's talk about the significance of visual components in our lives. Human beings love visual elements. Our brains capture more information from one single picture than multiple pages of text. Furthermore, we can process visual elements far faster than words.

30% of our brain neurons participate in the task of visual perception. In contrast, only 8% of brain neurons are active for hearing, and 3% of them are functioning for our touching sense.

Furthermore, when we look at visual components, our brains are able to process numerous pieces of information concurrently. Our brains can process visual elements around 60,000 times faster than they process textual elements.

Visual data such as images, graphics, illustrations, infographics are a significant aid to our brains when facing information overload of our personal and business lives. The reason behind much faster and more efficient visual processing is pretty simple. Threats in the ancient world were visible things, not memorandums, protocols or other documents.

The Kanban framework utilizes the Kanban board to make its workflow visible and transparent.

The way the Kanban board was set should enable proper planning, visualization, delivery of work, the continuous improvement of the workflow, and the effectiveness of the team’s service delivery.

How You Visualize Your Kanban Workflow

Visualization of your workflow and processes can become quite a daunting task. That is especially true if your organization used to tolerate opaque work among different silos of matrix organizational structure so far.

Some people can be quickly frustrated by the number of activities that go into building your product or service. They may think that it's not very easy to visualize their workflows in the first place, so they give up. Doing the work, but not being able to visualize it. Go and figure...

Nonetheless, the following four steps will help you visualize your workflow and build your first Kanban board.

• Step 1: Identify the scope of your process you would like to visualize.
• Step 2: List the steps that get into your process, which creates outcomes such as products and services.
• Step 3: Represent the steps of your process as columns or states on your Kanban board. Use swimlanes when a separate work category or service needs its own row.
• Step 4: Get back to work, experiment with, visualize and improve your Kanban workflow.

During this process, bear in mind that your visualization should cover the following items:

• Acceptance Criteria of business demands coming from the upstream work center before they can be taken into the Kanban workflow.
• Explicit policies which are similar to completion criteria. These will guide the Kanban team while their work flows from the left side to the right side of their Kanban board through the various development and delivery steps.
• Explicit policies to limit Work In Progress (WIP)
• Definition of Done (DoD) of Kanban team's deliverables before they can be dispatched to the down-stream work center.