Kanban principles
Five Kanban principles ensure an optimal cooperation and process. They are:
- Visualize your work: make all the work transparent. This way you get a shared overview and insight into your workload
- Limit ‘work in progress’: focus and prioritize. Stop starting, start finishing
- Focus on flow: ensure work flows across the board as quickly and resolve impediments
- Make agreements explicit: literally add your agreements to your board so the team has shared ownership and definitions of what defines ‘done’ in each process step
- Improve collectively: as a team regularly reflect on your process and improve continuously
Why use Kanban?
- To gain an overview of ongoing affairs and work in progress
- To have fewer spikes of work and better division of the workload across the team
- To focus your team on getting work to ‘done’
- To gain insight into bottlenecks and how to tackle these
- To ensure work is more easily transferred between colleagues
Who should use Kanban?
Kanban is primarily suited to teams of professionals who work with a continuous workflow or repeating work. These teams use kanban to gain an insight into their joint workload, prioritize and improve together. Examples of types of work that are well suited to Kanban are: licensing, recruitment, operations and systems management.
