The core Kanban principles are at the heart of reaping its rewards. Understanding and following them will allow you to truly improve your workflow, avoid confusion, and improve results.
While Kanban is a relatively simple visual project management tool, many project managers undervalue the importance of its principles, leading to panic when it doesn’t deliver the results they hoped for within the first couple of weeks.
In this guide to Kanban principles, you’ll avoid that by learning the real way to Kanban boards, so you can implement them as designed:
Key Takeaways on Kanban Principles
- Kanban principles should be understood by all using a Kanban board.
- They are:
- Incremental change and improvements
- A focus on workflow management
- Visualizing your workflow
- Starting with your existing setup
- Respecting existing roles
- Applying work-in-progress limits
- Making policies transparent
- Implementing feedback loops
- Improving collaboratively
- Updating your Kanban board without delay is crucial for these principles to have an effect.
- Using metrics to understand Kanban performance is highly advised.
- Using a project management software with real-time task updates, like Workamajig, can make implementing Kanban easy.
Kanban Principles Explained:
1. Incremental Changes and Improvements
The core principle of Kanban is continuous, incremental change and improvement.
Think of it as an evolution, not a revolution. It provides small, digestible changes rather than big leaps.
This makes it an ideal change management approach for teams prone to getting overwhelmed or fearful of unforeseen challenges.
Changes are often minor and are made based on those working with the Kanban board. But over time, these minor changes result in a slick and successful system.
As an example of a minor change, you could adjust one work-in-progress limit at a time, giving your team the chance to adjust and improve without panic.
2. Focus on Workflow
Kanban systems are a workflow solution. The goal is to manage your flow of work in the face of bottlenecks, roadblocks, or barren patches.
If some work items seem to stay on specific columns longer than expected, you’ll immediately be able to hold back on starting new ones, or know to check in with the person responsible for the task to see what impediments are hindering its progress.
Spotting these blockers before they cause massive project delays will help you ensure that your team won't miss deliverable deadlines.
Note that for this Kanban principle to be effective, you must move the Kanban cards in real time. If you delay even by a day, it can defeat the entire point.
3. Visualize Your Workflow
Gaining a focus on workflow is achieved via visualizing workflows.
Say hello to Kanban boards.
In Kanban boards, using columns for each stage of your workflow helps clarify where tasks are and makes it easier to manage starting new ones.
For example, when you work with a content creation team, you can standardize the checkpoints of your writing process policies and use them as columns.
This way, you can ensure that all your writers follow the same flow. It'll also make it easier for you to check in on their progress and provide guidance if they need any.
4. Start with Your Existing Setup
Implementing Kanban principles effectively requires that you start where you are.
Take your current processes and organizational structure and identify what works well and doesn’t, rather than making a revolutionary transformation from day one.
This approach allows for minimal disruption and leads to the next Kanban principle, incremental change.
5. Respect Existing Roles
Kanban doesn’t ask you to prescribe new roles like Scrum Master or Product Owner. It keeps things simple by allowing you to maintain your existing hierarchies, but then improve your workflows.
This is one of its most attractive qualities to many project managers, as it reduces most resistance to change and allows for quick implementation.
Again, evolution, not revolution!
6. Limit Work In Progress
Work In Progress (WIP) Limits are self-imposed rules that will help you limit overstretching your team. They are crucial to improving workflow.
For example, in the ‘In Progress’ column on a Kanban board, you could set WIP limits like “no more than 2 tasks at the same time”.
This approach prevents your team members from multitasking beyond their capacity and optimizes productivity and focus.
It also prevents people from context switching (where they alternate unrelated tasks in an attempt to progress on all of them). Context switching may make you feel productive, but it negatively affects your focus and task quality because of attention residue.
For example, imagine you're writing an article, and you suddenly feel the desire to look at your email. Giving in to that temptation, you might feel like you managed to stay on top of your inbox without compromising your writing. However, studies show that with attention residue, part of your attention will remain in your inbox even after you've switched to writing. This can affect the quality of your work.
7. Make Policies Transparent
Establishing standardized workflow policies when implementing Kanban principles will ensure your team remains aligned on how to perform their tasks and use the board.
Whether it’s through defining work processes, roles, responsibilities, or WIP limits, it will prevent corner-cutting and make the whole Kanban process more effective.
It also helps with easier onboarding, as new hires can easily integrate into the standard workflow once they use the same Kanban board that the whole team uses.
You’ll also encourage your team members to self-organize and act as leaders, as they’ll know what’s going on as well as you.
8. Implement Feedback Loops
For any sense of continuous improvement, you must have feedback.
Feedback allows project teams to monitor productivity and spot opportunities to improve. The sessions at which feedback is solicited are called a Kanban cadence.
There are seven key recommended meetings for the Kanban framework:
- Daily meetings: Daily stand-up
- Weekly meeting: Replenishment meeting
- Bi-weekly: Service delivery review
- Monthly: Risk review, operations review
- Occasionally: Delivery planning
- Quarterly: Strategy review
When you consistently facilitate these meetings, you can constantly evaluate if your strategies and processes are still effectively supporting your team's productivity. Bottlenecks and sources of friction can then be detected and addressed as soon as possible.
9. Improve Collaboratively
Kanban improvement only comes when it’s through collective teamwork.
That means trusting team members to use Kanban boards correctly and take responsibility.
This can come by encouraging the entire team to suggest incremental changes based on data and experimentation, rather than making dramatic overhauls based on assumptions.
While it can be scary to change things up, embracing this openness can benefit your team's productivity.
Tips for Using Kanban Principles without Mistakes
When implementing Kanban, many project managers implement it too fast by not focusing and overlooking the reason why they need to follow the core principles.
Although it may be a relatively simple visual tool, you still need to take it seriously. Don’t make these mistakes:
It’s Not a To-Do List
Don’t see your Kanban board as merely a to-do list. It’s more than a task tracker!
Remember at all times that a Kanban board is a flow system, so use it like one by tracking your flow, rate of flow, and adjusting as necessary.
Take WIP Limits Seriously
We cannot stress enough how important (and great) WIP limits can be. Ignoring them or setting them poorly can lead to over-multitasking, bottlenecks, slow delivery, and more context switching.
The good news is that you can adjust WIP limits at any moment. In fact, we guarantee you will need to at some point. So start subtly and adjust subtly when it feels your flow is too slow or too fast.
Craft Your Kanban Board Carefully
Each column in your workflow shows how your work really moves. So, make adjustments to any template you're using and don’t overlook critical stages in your workflow.
For example, your team might have a critical ‘test phase’ or something similar that should probably be separate from ‘in progress,’ as it’s likely a significant step in itself.
Always Update Your Kanban Board Quickly
When people stop updating a Kanban board, it loses all meaning, power, and trust.
Suddenly, there’s no point even reading it because how do you know if a task is really still in that phase?
So, ensure your team is fully onboard and aware of the importance of the Kanban method, with an easy way to update it.
The best solution is a work management tool like Workamajig that updates task health and current status in real time across all team member dashboards.
Use Metrics
Metrics are critical in Kanban, letting teams know how it’s helping and affecting change. Metrics like lead time, cycle time, or throughput, for example, can help you track performance and make changes in response.
Gain Leadership or Stakeholder Buy-In
Leadership rarely likes the idea of WIP limits that suggest work demands are about to be reduced. But data shows that Kanban practices can quickly bring increased focus, decision-making, and productivity.
We recommend showing them your metrics within the first couple of weeks to display how it’s positively streamlining your work.
Build Up Your Cadences Gradually
Feedback loops are often nonexistent within the first couple of sprints of using Kanban methodology. It’s going to take time for them to really take hold.
For that reason, we advise building up your cadences gradually. You can do this by identifying existing meetings and reviews that can be used for feedback, or by holding more frequent, shorter meetings to gain feedback.
Are Kanban’s Principles Right for My Team?
You can tell if Kanban is right for your team if you answer yes to the following questions:
- Do your priorities often change?
- Are your tasks continuous rather than performed in fixed chunks?
- Do you want (or are you able) to keep your current team structure?
- Do you want to visualize your workflow better?
- Do you want to reduce bottlenecks in your workflow?
How Workamajig Makes Following Kanban Principles Easy
It can be difficult to get all your team to follow Kanban’s principles, such as updating the Kanban board without delay. That will lead to reduced results and demotivation.
Workamajig is a project management software that makes Kanban simple by updating all team members' dashboards in real time.
Every time a task is updated, it’s reflected throughout the system, including via customizable Kanban-style visualizations.
That makes following Kanban principles slick and simple.
Best of all, everything is integrated. So, your budgets, timelines, resource allocations, and to-do lists can all be implemented into your Kanban visuals.
And with the click of a button, you can change up to any number of alternative visual tools.
All of this, and more, is possible via our carefully designed templates or with deep customization.
If you’d like to learn more about how Workamajig can transform your project management, we welcome you to request a free demo with our team!
Kanban Principles: Frequently Asked Questions
What are the principles of Kanban?
Kanban’s key principles are:
- To visualize workflow.
- To start with your existing set-up upon implementation.
- To gain incremental, evolutionary changes.
- To respect existing roles.
- To use work-in-progress limits.
- To implement feedback loops
Do I need to follow all the Kanban principles?
Yes. We highly recommend that you try to follow all the principles when using Kanban. Without following them, you’ll reduce the positive effects of the approach and potentially waste time and effort.
If you have to prioritize one, though, it should be keeping your Kanban boards up to date!
What is the basic Kanban layout?
The most common, or basic, Kanban board layout is dividing it into three columns, with ‘To-Do’, ‘In Progress’, and ‘Done’.
Can Kanban and Agile work together?
Yes! Agile methodology is the broader project management approach within which Kanban can be used to make workflow visible and better managed. So, it works very well within agile teams.
What is a Kanban board?
A Kanban board is a tool used to display, track, and visualize workflow as it moves through different stages. It removes the need for constant meetings and can limit overstretching due to work-in-progress limits.
It was created by Toyota in the 1940s to help the company reduce waste and improve its efficiency.
Can Kanban principles work with Scrum?
Yes. Kanban project management goes very well with Scrum. Scrum is all about roles and events, so you’ll retain the power of its structure, but gain Kanban’s transparent and super clear visual benefits.