What Are Key Kanban Practices?

Key Kanban practices introduced in this section will guide you toward effective operation of the Kanban framework. The following six general practices of the Kanban Method work together to improve service delivery. Their application is adapted to the context.

1. Visualize Your Workflow With Kanban: You can analyze, improve, and control your Kanban process by continually measuring it, and making it visible to your entire Kanban team and business stakeholders.
2. Limit Work In Progress (WIP) With Kanban: Limit the amount of work in progress at every step of your development and delivery processes. Thus, you continuously generate business value in shorter lead times and cycle times.
3. Make Kanban Policies Explicit: Rules and norms of your Kanban process need to be agreed in consensus, clearly defined, and publicized. When all Kanban team members are familiar with explicit principles and policies, and their joint business goals, then they can make decisions to bring your project in the correct direction.
4. Manage Kanban Workflow: Kanban focuses on managing the work processes to make the Kanban workflow robust, reliable, and fast, rather than focusing on keeping people busy.
5. Implement Kanban Feedback Loops: Feedback loops to measure outcomes of the Kanban process (macro-level feedback) and its associated steps (micro-level feedback), which lead to deliverables, will provide the required input for continuous improvement.
6. Improve Kanban Collaboratively, Evolve Kanban Experimentally: The Kanban process suggests a fact-based and collaborative approach in which everyone's opinion is counted. Kanban team members have room to experiment, make mistakes, assess, and learn from them. They can improve their process and, ultimately, their business outcomes.