Complete Understanding of Kanban Process

In the late 1940s, Toyota found a better engineering process to have better quality and reducing the lead time.

In simplest terms, better communication through visual management.

Kanban is Japanese for the card or visual signal. Toyota workers used kanban cards to signal steps in their manufacturing process.

The Kanban system’s visual nature allows teams to communicate more easily on what work needed to be done and when. It also standardized and refined processes, which helped to reduce waste and maximize value.

Why Kanban?

A picture is worth a thousand words for scientific reasons: The brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text or verbal communication. Verbal communication can sometimes be mis interpreted/misunderstood wrongly at times leading to increased lead time.

How Kanban is not only related to a manufacturing organization?

Kanban is just a way of representation of the status of the task. Suppose a task is assigned to multiple people. The task will be marked complete once all the assignees have completed their respective tasks. Each of the assignee's work is dependent on each other. With the help of Kanban tasks card the all the assignees will be aware of the status of other tasks and can plan their task accordingly.

This way of planning the work helps reduce the lead time and also improve the quality of the work.

In Software Development Life Cycle a developer will be knowing through Kanban tasks card as to in how much more hours is left for him to complete the task. A tester will be aware of when he will have to do the testing. A peer reviewer will be aware as to when he has to review the code. Thus, this process optimizes the work and reduces a lot of time.

At the end, a manager/project manager is also able to track all the records and status of the tasks and also the project.