Kanban in Practice

Get to grips with the leading Agile technique for continuous delivery
Overview

Kanban is emerging as the definitive process inspection tool for radically reorganising the way organisations manage their work. Though powerful in isolation, many teams choose to 'plug-in' Kanban to their existing Scrum, DSDM or plan-driven frameworks.

Course Code
AGI2KAN
Duration
2 Days
Delivery Style
Classroom
Course Type
Public or Private
Max Delegates
12
Available as Nutshell
No

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Purpose of this course

This course focuses on how to practically implement Kanban in the workplace. Core concepts are taught, then reinforced by a series of exercises. Attention will be given to how Kanban works in real life and time will be devoted to how elements of Kanban can be combined with other Agile/lean methodologies and frameworks.

In the final segment of the course your facillitator will help the team build their first real-life Kanban board and offer advice around what metrics may be appropriate for their particular circumstances.

Who is this course for

This course is suitable for anyone involved in product development, project managers, developers, Scrum Teams and stakeholders. No previous knowledge of Kanban, Agile or lean is assumed.

You will learn how to
  • Visualise workflow to promote transparency and uncover opportunities for process improvement.
  • Limit work in progress to reduce lead times and spot defects in your processes.
  • Manage workflow to ensure continuous delivery of product.
  • Combine Kanban with other Agile and lean frameworks.
Benefits for your organisation

Development teams are increasingly asked to do more with less, Kanban helps to ensure that the most valued work is completed in as short amount of time as possible. It is a particularly useful methodology for organisations who combine their development and support activities and/or operate in a dynamic and unpredictable environment.

Benefits for you as an individual

You’ll learn how limiting work in progress will increase your teams productivity and help you to identify problems and bottlenecks. Kanban will also help you to manage your workload so that you are not only continuously adding maximum value to the business, but also able to give realistic lead times on future requests.

Kanban principles
  • Three core principles
  • Three essential practices
Visualising your work
  • Making policies explicit
  • The Kanban board
  • Queues
Work items
  • Design principles
  • Work-item cards
  • Types of work
  • Progress indicators
  • Work-item size
Work in progress
  • Understanding WIP
  • Efforts of too much WIP
Limiting work in progress
  • Whole board, whole team approach
  • Column based WIP
  • Team member based WIP
Managing flow
  • Why flow?
  • Helping work to flow
  • The daily standup
  • Managing bottlenecks
Classes of service
  • What is class of service?
  • The urgent case
Planning and estimating
  • What should you plan?
  • Estimating
  • Estimation techniques
  • Candence
Process improvement
  • Retrospectives
  • Root cause analysis
  • Kanban Kata
Metrics
  • Common metrics
  • Statistical Process Control & Cumulative Flow Diagram
  • Metrics as improvement guides
Kanban pitfalls
  • The necessary revolution
  • Kanban and laziness
  • When to timebox
Kanban & other methodologies
  • Scrumban
  • Kanban & XP
Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course. Delegates with an understanding of lean and/or Agile will learn how Kanban can work in synergy with those frameworks.

To maximise benefit it is recommended that delegates from no more than three different value streams attend this training. This will allow the facillitator to take the theoretical learning and put it into practice.

Pre-course work required

One to two hours of blended learning delivered through our virtual learning platform.