Introduction:

The first three weeks you have made a complete overview of your work environment with all your interactions, tasks and even have thought about potential nature based solutions. To support you in your dynamic and complex work environment, a tool used in Lean management will be given this week. It should help you to have some structure and give you a clear overview of all the tasks to do, you are doing and you have done. The concept we are going to use is called Kanban.
In the fourth week of the BiTL course, information about how to create and use the Kanban concept, will be given to you this week by an instruction video and some supporting text.
It will definitely help you clear your head and organize all the tasks you have to do!

Supporting Knowledge:

Kanban means billboard or signboard in Japanese, and that’s basically the core of the Kanban concept. By using the concept, tasks will be visualized, structured and maybe most important prioritized.

In the video below, a brief explanation of the concept Kanban is given.

As you have seen in the video, the Kanban concept is very useful for someone like you, with all the tasks you have to do. Remember that this is a Pull based concept! The clients demand is the trigger for the process.

Besides the information in the video, Kanban is a bit more. Next 5 points will give you the necessary knowledge to start and especially continue with implementing your own Kanban concept in your own work environment.

1. Visualize!
   Try to visualize as much as possible. What are the tasks, when finished, who’s responsible, etc. But keep it structured!
2. Limit the amount of tasks in progress.
   As mentioned before, it is a pull based concept. Make sure to finish the work in progress first, before adding new tasks.
3. Manage the flow of the process.
   Make sure that the tasks move smooth and continuously through the Kanban. The shorter the time of ‘Work in progress’ the faster the specific demand is delivered.
4. Implement feedback loops.
   Make sure that there are meetings monthly, weekly and daily! Make sure that the same subjects are being discussed on the same given moments.
5. Improve together and evolve experimentally!
   The Kanban concept doesn’t have a clear end product, it is a way of working. Continuous improvement together and dare to experiment!

ASSIGNMENT

Use a blank piece of paper (A4) and draw or photoshop (or anything else to visualize) the current state of all your tasks in you work environment by using the kanban concept. Use the three columns To-do, Doing and Done and figure out where your bottlenecks in the process are! Too many tasks in total? Too many tasks at the same time?

Next week we will discuss how to improve and evolve by using the improvement Kata, so no worries!