Reinforcing Remote Working with Kanban
What is Kanban?
At its root, Kanban is a task management method conceived to improve customer satisfaction and better productivity, by creating fast and reliable workflows capable of delivering products and services of superior quality. Though originating in the automotive industry of Japan, as a method for improving manufacturing efficiency at Toyota, by the turn of the century, key players within other industries realised that Kanban was powerful and could be positively used to change the ways in which products and services were delivered. Companies across the world have realised that Kanban has the most flexible architecture allowing it to scale across organisations in a human way.
The Perfect Team Player – The Challenge of Coordinating Work in a Remote Environment
On several occasions across teams, departments, and organizations, more often than not, tasks get overlooked, notes go unnoticed, and important ideas are lost in translation leading to a workforce that is inevitably stressed, fatigued, and underproductive. Teams around the world have found a solution to this situation. It’s called Kanban. Kanban is a visual representation of managing work that can bring order, discipline and focus into the way your team functions.
Kanban brings out the full meaning of teamwork through this one concept: Visualise your workflow. The concept might sound too simplistic, but it has proven its worth over time. It can truly accelerate a team’s ability to work with clarity and purpose. With Kanban teams are motivated to identify, prioritise, and intentionally complete delegated work items one at a time, and simultaneously combat the challenges of multitasking in a hyper-stimulated world. A key aspect of Kanban is to reduce the amount of multi-tasking that most teams are prone to do and alternately encourage them to “Stop Starting! And Start Finishing!”, a phrase coined by Dr. Arne Roock.
Agile in a Remote Work Environment
Agile experts have propounded a typical “small, independent, crossfunctional, self-organising, collocated teams” structure as the ideal way to implement Agile and Lean Methods. This pandemic has contradicted that – and teams are left with no option but to make Agile work in a distributed split environment. Fortunately, the early practitioners of Lean/ Agile in most enterprises – were already used to working in a globally distributed environment. Agile methods are based on the tenets of frequent inspection and adaptation, leading to self-organization, constant communication, focus on the customer, greater teamwork, and the delivery of value. Project Managers vociferously advocate the use of Kanban, in particular, amongst the various tools available in the Lean/ Agile collection, as a powerful influencer for teams to make Agile work in a distributed environment.
1. Visualisation is Key
Kanban is known for its excessive emphasis on visualisation of work for knowledge teams. Without visualisation (Kanban board) or any other medium that suits a team’s context, work that teams do remains hidden in computers, emails, and various workflow/ collaboration tools. Kanban helps them to explicitly address this situation and better understand the status of work with better coordination across the system, thus making it more important for remote teams to stay in touch with each other.
2. Use of WIP (Work In Progress) Limits
This pandemic and the consequential remote working have led to people feeling fatigued. People are working longer and harder to get their work in sync. The Kanban Method propagates implementation of WIP (Work in Progress) limits to reduce multitasking and overloading of teams, emphasising more on the need to finish. Given the difficult times, we find ourselves in now, wherein work-home boundaries are dissolving, this characteristic feature of Kanban can be an asset in helping teams manage their work more effectively! Kanban has become a force to reckon with its excessive importance on task visualisation, and an explicit set of well structured policies that control how work navigates throughout the team. Kanban proposes that each person, or team, work only on a prefixed set of activities. Limiting the work is imperative to implementing a pull system, since by limiting the capacity of a process it is possible to figure out where there is scope to assume more tasks. The progress (WIP) would boost productivity and lower the number of tasks left to be actioned in the “Doing” state by forcing the team to focus on a small set of critical activities and not pull up a new task until the previous job is completed.