This is part of my ongoing series on Lean, Innovation, Lean Startup, Agile, and disruption.

Kanban is a tool in Lean which is used to help send messages downstream without needing to actually talk to each other. Which is powerful in a manufacturing setting as communication might be difficult depending on the environment. Kanban translate as card from Japanese and typically has information related to the number of items that need to be in a bin and what the item is that needs to be in a bin.

Example of a Kanban board on Trello

Some Agile practitioners have adopted Kanban to be a set of steps in the process for developing software. This could be as simple as Ideas, To Do, Doing, Completed, or as complicated as Backlog, Wireframe, Coding, QA, Testing, Integration, Complete. Ideally, simpler is better, because more bins make management of the lists much more complicated than if there are that many phases in the Kanban board, but this is really up to the preference of the team and whatever works best based on the Build measure Learn approach.

Even developing a Kanban system for software development the team should view it as another possible to learn how to work with each other better. This includes the information that’s required for a piece of work to be started. For example, determining what information is the minimum for a User Story is something that must be agreed upon by the team. Furthermore, the Acceptance Criteria can help reduce the number of steps on the Kanban board as these may simply be part of the acceptance criteria for a complete story.

Using stories and Kanban board can help with Innovation through creating bite size pieces of work that can be designed to reduce the environment of uncertainty the product is being developed in. Since uncertainty is the greatest risk to the project it is vital to write user stories and use the kanban board to maximize efficiencies with developing a new product.

The Kanban board is also extremely effective for ensuring that startups keep their energy focused on the most important thing. No work should be done on an item if the work is not on the Kanban board. If the work is vital to the startup, then it needs to be recorded and validated that it’s the right thing to be doing. Yes, it might slow things now, but the Kanban board is an effective tool to help people understand who is working on what and how those interact with other problems out there. This doesn’t meant that immediate issues shouldn’t be resolved immediately, but for development purposes no new work should be done without having an item on the Kanban board.