Applying Kanban Principles at Your Workplace
If you have ever been a part of an HR, Marketing, or a Sales team — or even been friends with someone who is, you must be well aware of the continuous pain of managing, prioritizing, and re-prioritizing multiple tasks as new projects and initiatives keep getting added. Be it your team that’s slipping on dates, critical designing software license expiring right at the nth hour, upset clients, or you being the bottleneck for reviewing proposal documents, it’s something that you almost deal with daily.
Most professionals involved in any of these teams can be seen working with complicated excel sheets or using basic project management software in a bid to manage the projects as best as they can. Though helpful initially, as teams scale up, managing all projects simultaneously becomes a humongous task by itself. To top it, excel sheets and desktop software cannot be used collaboratively by teams to update their status together. This makes it difficult to track ongoing projects, resources assigned to projects, resource workload, tasks that are slipping due dates, etc. In essence, you cannot really see how a project is progressing at a glance.
This makes a Visual Project Management tool an interesting option. Kanban offers one such solution.
Is Kanban only for software development teams?
Kanban helps teams visualize tasks, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and improve operations in terms of throughput and quality. The crux of implementing Kanban in an organization refers to the fact that the organization has analyzed its current processes, and that its members agree to change processes to achieve improvement, without altering the current roles and responsibilities of the team/organization. While the actual implementation of Kanban varies from organization to organization, the basic principle remains the same: to do away with guesswork and be as close to facts as possible.
However, a lot of people think (and at times assume) that Kanban is only related to software development. This assumption does not hold much ground, and is not really based on any facts. It is just what it is — an assumption. They forget that Kanban has its roots in the manufacturing industry, and hence is almost a natural fit in the non-IT/Software business processes as well.
Is a team involved in the SDLC cycle the only team that needs to “visualize their work, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and improve operations in terms of throughput and quality”? What about IT/Ops, Staffing, Recruitment, Marketing and Sales, Procurement — for that matter, any business function? Won’t these benefits be desired and applicable to these and more teams (not listed here) for reaping benefits of reduced lead time, increased throughput and much higher quality of products or services delivered? They will obviously be.
The best part about Kanban principles is that by nature they are very flexible, and can be incorporated and practiced in almost any scenario. The most basic Kanban board consists of just 3 columns: To Do, Doing, Done as shown in the figure below. Based on the principles (mentioned earlier), there are five core Kanban practices that can be followed by almost all departments in an organization to achieve success.
1. Understand and visualize the flow of work in the department
2. Limit Work-In-Progress (WIP) using a virtual Kanban system
3. Manage the work flow
4. Make the Management Policies Explicit
5. Use Models and the scientific method and Improve collaboratively
Kanban for Any Business Functions or Process
Kanban can be used by any business function such as HR, Marketing, Sales, Procurement and so forth in both medium and large product and services organizations. You can take any business process and display it on a Kanban board. Thus, a wide variety of organizations - staffing and recruitment organizations, advertising agencies, insurance companies and many others utilize Kanban for streamlining their operations, eliminating waste, and dramatically improving throughput and quality. A few benefits of implementing Kanban practices are:
HR: Kanban in the HR function provides a lot of benefits by visualizing the workflow, whereby talent acquisition teams can track the number of applications, applicants shortlisted, interviews lined up, offers rolled out, and candidates joining. As any department may raise a request for hire, a Kanban board helps manage and predict the flow, identify point of contact (POCs), etc. The work in progress (WIP) concept helps to have a time limit to close hiring requests faster. It helps bring in a lot more transparency by making processes and policies explicit.
Marketing: Implementing a Kanban board for tracking your marketing campaigns might be one of the best things you can do. It can prove to be a central point of reference for the entire team giving an update about all the activities being performed, coming up, and in progress with respect to various marketing campaigns. This will help the various sub-teams such as Event Management, Digital Marketing, PR, Internal Communications, etc. be aware of what they need to do at a given point in time.
R&D Teams: Implementing a Kanban system enables R&D teams “achieve significant improvement in efficiency, winning together, work atmosphere, quality, and client focus.” - Achi Hackmon, Director, AIS R&D, Actimize (NICE). R&D team processes are typically longer and complex including many stages such as idea, basic research, concept development, product development, prototyping, technology transfer among many. Therefore, visual project management with Kanban can provide much needed visibility into multiple R&D projects and help eliminate bottlenecks, if any.
Sales: Kanban can also work for Sales function by providing a means for tracking all leads, RFP responses, and contracts using Kanban boards.
Then there’s Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) with Kanban management which looks at the business as an ecosystem of interdependent services and uses Kanban method along with a full range of complementary techniques to help you reach a new level of alignment across your organization.
To summarize, a properly implemented Kanban system helps to smooth the flow of work, maximizes “throughput”, and achieve high product quality, irrespective of your business function or process. What is essential however is to regularly monitor a Kanban system once it has been implemented. This needs support from everyone in the team - whether at the management level, or someone in the team. Unless this is done, unless people really understand the benefits and business criticality of Kanban for improved workflows, reduced inventory and the direct and continued benefit to the health of the company, the impact will not really be visible.
To learn more about Kanban visit: https://www.digite.com/kanban/what-is-kanban/
