What Is Kanban In Agile Values, Principles, Benefits & Career

Kanban is getting a wide-scale popularity in Agile organizations because of its unmatched values, principles, and benefits. The certified Kanban training courses, designed for different levels, allow the program managers, delivery managers, project managers, software product developers and business analysts etc to choose the best and to boost up their career growth.  

What is Kanban?

Kanban methodology gets its name from its literary meaning- visual signaling used to start an action to control and manage the work in progress. The Kanban methodology reflects that the work progress flows continuously through a structured system instead of being managed according to prefixed time boxes.

Kanban is a widely used methodology to design and improve the flow management of knowledge work. It allows the Agile organizations to start the project with the existing workflow system and to drive evolutionary changes gradually. They can do this by visualizing their flow of work, limit work in progress (WIP) and stop- starting and start finishing.

Eight Kanban Values:

Project development teams applying Kanban methodology embrace the following eight values to improve the quality and performance:

• Customer Focus: Kanban methodology guides to optimize the workflow to serve a specific purpose ensuring the ultimate satisfaction of customer.
• Collaboration: It encourages consistent improvement. Project team members work collaboratively to find appropriate solutions for the process improvements. Kanban guides to improve the way teams work together.
• Understanding: It guides to understand the working pattern within organization, as well as, the tailored approach to make required changes.
• Transparency: The core strength of Kanban transparency comes from process visualization, introduction of new policies and creation of feedback loops. Kanban teams enjoy the transparency at all the levels like status update, process understanding, work visibility, decision-making process, and change of opportunities.  
• Leadership: Kanban encourages leadership with the ability to inspire other team members for continuous improvement to deliver maximum value.
• Agreement: Everyone is committed to continuous improvement and agree to move collaboratively towards the goals accommodating and respecting the differences of approach and opinion.
• Balance: The different viewpoints, capabilities, and aspects should be balanced to achieve the expected results.
• Respect: It encourages respecting the current responsibilities and roles of individuals. By respecting the current roles of team members, it is easier to gain their willingness for the recommended changes.

4 Principles of Kanban Agile Methodology:

The Kanban Agile methodology involves  the following 4 principles:

1. The quick communication should be intuitive and agile through easy to comprehend visual signals.Different tasks, with feasible limit, should flow simultaneously without affecting the quality.
2. The task flow should be periodically controlled through tests and KPIs to judge the future problems well in time.
3. The Kanban Agile methodology seeks consistent process improvement as well as adding values to each project development stage. The final result should be fine-tuned to client’s needs.

Kanban Benefits for Agile Organizations
The use of Kanban methodology in Agile project management delivers multiple benefits to organizations; the more commonly experienced 7 benefits are:

• Kanban Improves The Visibility For All

Kanban information board offers the holistic view of bottlenecks, progress, blockers, process inefficiencies and impediments at a glance. The latest Information is available not only to project team members but also to external stakeholders.

• Kanban Values Business Value

The ‘Personal WIP Limits’ in Kanban Agile methodology relieves the teams from being overburdened. The work items to be delivered are numbered with priority; it helps to complete high-priority and high-value tasks earlier giving more values to organization.

• Kanban Reduces Value-Less Activities

The WIP limits make the Kanban information board a pull-based system that helps in on-time completion of high-quality tasks by reducing the valueless activities.

• Kanban Improves Sustainability

Kanban helps to manage the work at a sustainable and smooth pace eliminating distressing peaks that often lead the team members to frustration, low performance and make them less focused on the task.

• Kanban Introduces Kaizen Culture

Kanban introduces Kaizen’s concept evolving around the continuous and incremental improvement all across the information board. The flow-based on-time smooth delivery of software reduces the cost and efforts invested for inventory management.

• Kanban Makes Predictions Reliable

The predictions based on the latest real data are more reliable rather than the project manager’s guess. The timely predictions improve the delivery standards continuously.    

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Implementation of Kanban in Agile:

Kanban is an Agile methodology as it fulfils all the 12 principles of Agile manifesto whilst it is incremental not iterative. Kanban offers a set of tools that helps to become more Agile. Agile teams can use Kanban tool set to improve the existing processes. The optimized WIP according to the team's capacity helps the Agile software development teams to have more flexible planning options, faster outputs, better transparency and a clearer focus.The purpose of using Kanban board is to ensure that workflow is as per set standards, and all the dependencies are identified and resolved at the earliest. The basic Kanban board has a three-step workflow:

Kanban board keeps the Agile team members updated for any state of work item at any point of time. The Kanban board helps the Agile teams build compliance in planning, reduce the cycle time, focus on value, to be more responsiveness to modification, to deliver the product effectively.

Scope of Kanban Training:

A variety of classroom and team/corporate Kanban certification course is available allowing the project management professionals to choose the best as per profession, career objective and experience. The more in-demand courses are-

• Kanban system design (LKU) training course
• Kanban management professional (LKU) training course
• Lean Kanban training course
• Team Kanban practitioner (LKU) training course  

Team Kanban Practitioner is the entry-level course designed to introduce the practitioner with Kanban board concepts and visualization tactics that help for better project management.  Lean Kanban training course, widely growing popular in software industry, provides insights into implementation of Lean and Kanban principles with WIP model. Kanban management professional training course provides understanding of Kanban cadence encompassing commitment, replenishment, delivery planning etc. Kanban system design training course is designed to train the professionals for introducing the Kanban system into the existing workflow.    

Career Prospects with Kanban Certification
Kanban is getting a wide-scale popularity in IT project management and other business sectors including manufacturing because it can overcome the problems often faced while implementing Scrum and Waterfall methodologies in Agile. Because of growing competencies, it is not necessary to break up the complete project into small and uniform units before the start; here, Kanban has an edge as it enables the project development team to work over the mixture of different size units with different level complexities as per priority. 

Kanban certification demonstrates the commitment to learn the best, and, organizations value this quality. A certified Kanban training course is the best pick for the program managers, delivery managers, project managers, software product developers. and business analysts etc to boost their career growth almost instantly.