Kanban Practices: The 6 Core Practices Explained

The Kanban Method has 6 core practices: visualize, limit work in progress (WIP), manage flow, make policies explicit, implement feedback loops, and improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally. Kanban University now calls them "general practices". This article explains each practice with examples, the typical Kanban meetings and how to apply them in Merlin Project.

The core practices show how to apply Kanban day to day: how to run, measure and improve a Kanban system. Part I of this series explains the foundation: Kanban principles: the 6 core principles and 9 values. Our Kanban board guide shows how to set up a board step by step. This article is based on "Essential Kanban Condensed" by David J. Anderson and Andy Carmichael, "Kanban from the Inside" by Mike Burrows and the Kanban Guide by Kanban University.

What is a workflow system?

Using the Kanban method, you can define, manage, and improve organizations that provide value-oriented services to customers as systems. In knowledge work, you do not deliver physical goods, but information in different forms. You view the associated processes as a sequence of knowledge determination steps with their associated process rules, which you map on a Kanban board.

Kanban boards are special workflow systems in which work packages flow through different stages of a process from left to right. To be considered a Kanban system, they must fulfill several conditions. They must have signals that restrict the so-called parallel work or WIP (Work in Progress). And Kanban systems must mark points for commitment and delivery. A commitment is an explicit or tacit agreement between the customer and the service provider, in which:

the customer requests a job and will accept it, and
the service provider will create and deliver it to the customer.

The number of work packages that are between the points for commitment and delivery in the system is the parallel work (WIP). In this Kanban board, the optical signals that limit parallel work (WIP) are derived from the composition of the cards, the WIP limits (in boxes above the columns), and the corresponding column. The (system) cycle time of a work package is the time it is in this range. It is important that you process the work packages in a Kanban system according to the pull principle, depending on capacities or capabilities. It should not be the customer who assigns the work (push principle). To improve the lead time for work packages, you must limit the parallel work (WIP) in your system. This is one of Kanban's core practices.

What are the 6 Kanban core practices?

The 6 Kanban core practices are the activities teams use to introduce, run and improve a Kanban system:

Visualize
Limit work in progress (WIP)
Manage flow
Make policies explicit
Implement feedback loops
Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally

These practices contain two important points:

See the work and process rules that determine how it is executed.
Improve the process evolutionarily by maintaining, strengthening and learning from useful changes and mitigating or reversing ineffective changes.

According to Mike Burrows, the individual core practices map to the Kanban values of transparency, balance, collaboration, customer focus and flow. This article therefore follows the values rather than the numbering.

The core practices Visualize, Make policies explicit and Implement Feedback Loops relate to Transparency.

CP1: What does visualize mean in Kanban?

Visualizing means making all work and its flow visible on a board so that everyone involved sees the same status. You implement Kanban systems using a Kanban board. This visualizes the entire work process (Transparency). A Kanban board is a whiteboard with sticky notes or an electronic board with corresponding icons. The sticky notes or such icons on an electronic board are called Kanban, which stands in Japanese for visual signs or placeholders. The common English terms are card, ticket or work package, depending on whether it's about visual design and what they represent. You move the tickets on the board from column to column as the work progresses in the underlying work package.

In a service organization, work packages stand for defined parts of knowledge work such as service requests that you must fulfill. They exist in many different areas: in legal departments, human resources, sales, and the managing director's office. What they have in common is that this work is done in people's heads or on computers and is not visible without a Kanban board.

On a well-structured Kanban board with a clear ticket design you can easily see:

Which work is currently blocked.
Who works on what.
How much work is in which degree of completion.

If this information is permanently available to you, you will quickly develop a feeling for a healthy state of the system. You will see immediately when things deviate from the norm and when you need to find out how to correct them.

The Kanban visualization should make on the one hand the demand for taking action visible and on the other hand help employees to make good decisions. This works on two levels:

Actions as work packages which need to be done, require decisions about the selection of the packages.
Actions changing the system require decisions in the justification, scope and introduction of change.

By triggering actions and supporting good decisions, Kanban leads employees to more mature behavior. If the Kanban board indicates that things aren't proceeding as they should, there are various ways for the management to respond. Statements like Do you understand why things turned out this way? Do you want to change the system accordingly? How should I help you? or I respect your ability to make appropriate changes in this situation reflect a leadership style that supports more mature behavior. Organizations that consciously accept these behaviors of their employees and promote this leadership style are well on the way to higher maturity.

The above mentioned statements contain self-organisation as another important element. Self-organization not only for the individual employees allowing them acting autonomously, but also for the system which can be reorganized and adjusted in order to deal more effectively with its challenges. For system operation as well as for system change, self-organization is both effective and humane.

A visually managed system can be changed quickly and cost-effectively: Erase one or more lines on the whiteboard, draw in another stickers and move a few. Or perform a few clicks with the mouse if you are working with software. The impact of these small changes can be enormous. Compared to the rather low implementation effort, this work on the system is an high leverage activity.

It's a virtuous circle:

The Kanban system organizes the work.
People organize themselves around work.
From their new perspective, people see that the Kanban system could organize work better than it does at the moment and they change it.

CP4: What are explicit policies in Kanban?

Explicit policies are written agreements on how the team accepts work, processes it and declares it done. A purely visual language in the form of tickets and columns and the like is sometimes not enough. Sometimes a few words about the process rules make the difference. They are a way for employees to maintain a common understanding of how they operate the system and can be more effective than regulations on a 'top-down' basis.

In addition to the strategy of making the invisible visible (visualize), you make the implicit explicit in the form of process rules. This is another aspect of the value Transparency. You only use process rules if it helps to make better and predictable decisions. You should not write extensive documents. A few carefully chosen words that express an intention are sufficient. Sometimes a single word above a Kanban column is enough to support an effective working agreement.

There are various process rules:

Regarding the criteria work packages should meet: Tickets in the 'Ready to go' column should not require more than five days work in development.
Keywords: Demo or Codereview
Global process rules: If a new work package gets pulled, the client is informed in case it is likely to affect existing work.

You cannot apply these rules universally, but you can transfer them to comparable contexts. There are rules that are unique to a situation. The context is important. Start with simple process rules that reflect current practice and refine as needed: Start with what you are doing makes sense here.

CP5: What are feedback loops in Kanban?

Feedback loops are regular meetings and measurements the team uses to check whether its Kanban system is healthy. The original draft of the Kanban method contained no feedback loops. But they are essential. Early feedback helps you and your staff not to overlook or ignore the signs that your Kanban system is unhealthy. Through feedback loops, Transparency becomes an effective and targeted driver of change.

What meetings are there in Kanban?

Kanban does not prescribe meetings, but most teams use three formats: the standup meeting, the replenishment meeting and the retrospective. The Kanban Guide by Kanban University groups such meetings as "Kanban Cadences".

Standup meetings offer the opportunity for different types of feedback. These are regularly held meetings (mostly daily) that are so short that all participants can and should stand comfortably for the duration. They can have different formats, whereby we concentrate on the board-centered meetings:

You go through the work packages on the Kanban board from right to left and start with those that are close to completion. End the meeting if it seems unproductive to go further left on the board.
Or you go through the board as above from right to left and discuss the work packages that block the workflow or are risky.

These two meeting formats support the goal of making your decisions more transparent:

What you should work on and how to do so.
When you should take targeted action to support and advance a work package.
When you should monitor how the system really works.

They also contain a social aspect that helps you building your team. The individual team members not only learn what is going on overall through these regular meetings, but they also get an insight into the work of the other team members. This way they better understand the needs of the team members and the communication becomes more direct and honest through the built up trust.

Another common form is the Replenishment Meeting. This is the discussion round where you fill the Input queue (Backlog) with new work. Since it provides an external view by the customer, it is an important feedback cycle. However, replenishment meetings are very contextual. Design their flow and frequency to suit the situation.

There are also other meeting formats that help manage the improvement process or provide it with data. The retrospective at team level is popular. Further forms are Service Delivery Reviews and Operations Reviews. Several teams share their data with each other and with the customer regarding the improvements they have made. The goal of these meetings is to create conditions in which you can generate quick feedback and act effectively.

CP2: What is a WIP limit in Kanban?

A WIP limit is the maximum number of cards allowed in a column or section of the board at the same time; WIP stands for work in progress. The value Balance is closely related to Kanban's second core practice Limit the Work-in-Progress (WIP).

The WIP limits on a Kanban board serve as a coordination mechanism to implement a pull system. When you set a WIP limit for a column, you limit the number of work packages that it can contain. If a column contains the maximum number of tickets according to its limit, it cannot receive anything more. Its capacity is exhausted. If you move a ticket from this column further to the right because it has been processed in this area, a free space is created again. This has an important meaning: It signals availability. You can again pull a ticket from the previous column.

That's how pull systems work: The work moves on the board to the right towards completion. This causes the availability signals to move to the left (upstream). Further work packages can move forward to the vacated position as soon as they are ready. In those areas of the system where you have a row of columns with WIP limits, these signals move rapidly upstream. The entire system is linked. Without WIP limits there are no pull signals.
The signal flow stops when it reaches a column without a limit.The period of time that a work package needs to move through this entire system is the lead time of the Kanban system. It is sometimes very different from the lead time that you measure from the customer's point of view.

Balance of work load and capacity:

A Kanban board, which contains columns with WIP limits, ensures for the responsible employees in the corresponding areas that the amount of work does not exceed the capacity. This prevents employees from being overloaded. If you prioritize completing tasks over starting new work, you improve quality by improving focus. In addition, there are fewer work packages in the entire pipeline, which allows you to complete the work much faster and receive feedback much earlier.

Occasionally you'll get the impression that the WIP limits are set incorrectly. Use these situations to start discussions and research. If the limits are too high, work packages get stuck because employees are missing to process them. If you choose too low limits, employees will not have enough work and the system will stagnate. Investigate the reasons for this, rather than prematurely adjusting the limit.

WIP limits do not just serve as levers to enforce rules. Rather, they can be seen as mechanisms for feedback and drivers for system-wide improvements. If you reduce the work in progress, other problems become much clearer. If you fix these, you can further reduce the WIP.

But if you assume that you need to employ new people first, this does not solve the problem of blocked work. Instead, start new work and increase the Work in Progress in your system. This means waiting more often for others to finish up and the problem gets worse. Delays and multitasking have a negative impact on quality. This leads to more rework and blockages and the work in progress increases more and more.

Balance of urgent and on-time work:

Particularly for knowledge work, not all forms of work are the same. There are work packages driven by deadlines and urgencies. You must deliver time-driven work packages at a certain point in time. If the delivery takes place too late, it can become expensive for your organization. If you deliver earlier, there is no added value, but it could be detrimental. For urgency-driven work packages, the sooner you deliver, the earlier you or others can benefit. It is most effective if you deliver the urgent work before the scheduled work. Prioritize the on-time work when the deadline is at risk. If you handle these types of work packages in this way, you will get good results.

For some work packages it is difficult to make a safe decision. They are neither time-bound nor urgent. You'll have to take the risk and experiment. Do the longer-term work in the background (risk-based categorization). This is the only way you can develop the product, process or employee skills.

You can also categorize your work packages according to different service promises, so-called service classes. They help the customer to select the service class that is best suited to his or her needs and best represents the balance between risk and outcome. Within your organization, planning rules guide the decision as to which work packages you work through with which priority in order to achieve good results. With a healthy mix of different types of work, you can make and maintain accurate predictions. It is important to consider sufficient buffers of immaterial and standard work.

CP6: How do Kanban teams improve collaboratively and experimentally?

Improving collaboratively and experimentally means planning changes to the system as experiments with a hypothesis, measuring the result and learning from it together. With Kanban's core practice Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally you promote and improve Collaboration in a targeted way. To understand how this core practice relates to the value of cooperation, you need to look at the extended formulation:

Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally (use models and the scientific method).

The importance of cooperation becomes clear when you look at concrete examples of famous creative cooperations. Consider the collaboration between Marie and Pierre Curie. It was a cooperation that had an enormous impact. It wasn't just people working together in general. Rather, it was a relationship in which creativity as a whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, you can't expect every workplace cooperation to be so spectacularly productive.

An effective organization is expected to use cooperation in the delivery of its products and services. In this sense, the first part of the 6th core practice improve objectives cooperatively means that part of the creative energy is used to optimize the underlying delivery system.

From the point of view of cooperation, the concepts of feedback cycles and self-organisation, which belong to the value of Transparency, take on a different meaning. Feedback cycles involve several people working together (cooperatively) on one thing. And when teams work self-organized, improvements and innovations develop from collaborations that arise from the fact that the appropriate group of employees is automatically involved. However, continuous self-organized improvement does not simply develop overnight. It is important that you encourage cooperation and focus on it. We will explain later what role leadership plays in this.

It's useful not only to look at the number of interactions in a work process or the order in which they take place. It is important that you also focus on the quality of the individual interactions. This is to be understood as an independent strategy and not as a pure technique, which you use in the context of a certain improvement possibility. It is important to identify key processes that are slowed down by low quality interactions, delays, back-and-forth conversations, rework and frustration. In addition, you will try to find out if there are employees or teams who rarely have the opportunity to engage in quality collaboration. If you recognise this, you can increase the creativity of your organisation.

If something surprises or frustrates you, ask yourself whether it can be due to the lack of cooperation. Even if it may at first look like a mistake by a single person or a mistake in a process.

In summary, Improve Collaboratively stands for how you drive change. The second part of the 6th core practice Evolve Experimentally, on the other hand, stands for how you implement change. The Kanban method is based on the concept of a process for problem solving. You apply this process repeatedly in an improvement cycle. The Kanban community uses the PDMA, also called Deming cycle or Deming circle/wheel, where the first letters stand for Plan, Do, Check, Act. It is important to use the individual terms in connection with the term experiment:

Plan: Plan an experiment (based on a hypothesis).
Do: Do the experiment.
Check: Check the results of the experiment.
Act: Act on the results by changing the hypothesis or system accordingly and sharing your learning outcomes appropriately with others.

You need a high degree of discipline to implement changes according to scientific procedures. As a result, you give the concept of result-oriented work within your organization an additional new meaning.

CP3: How do you manage flow in Kanban?

Managing flow means moving cards through the board smoothly and predictably and removing waiting times and blockers deliberately. To better understand the meaning of core practice 3 Manage Flow, you need to expand it a little:

Manage the workflow to achieve consistency, punctuality and good economic results, while anticipating customer needs.

This formulation clearly shows to what extent the third core practice is linked to the value Customer Focus:

There are several things you should pay attention to when doing your work: Task focus, team focus, product focus, technology focus and so on. Focusing on the customer helps you put these no less important points of view into perspective. We will show you below how Customer Focus can optimize the workflow. Since if you look at your work from someone else's perspective, you are likely to learn something new about how it operates.

Let's take an example from software development: A team of developers had created a process that seemed effective enough. They collected requirements, built new functions, tested them and released them. After some time, the team became more demanding. To track the new features, they added another column to their board. These new features were already released, but further steps were needed to make them complete. Too often, the team found out that it was delivering features that the (in this case internal) customer never used. And this, although the functions were desired by him. So a new process rule developers remain responsible for work packages until they receive feedback from the customer that the packages are proving valuable was added.

This process rule was aimed at the allegedly poor customer behaviour; The customer isn't telling the team when he changes his mind. This new process rule quickly changed the behavior on both sides. Closing a feedback loop accelerated collaboration with the customer. Developers and internal customers jointly created the final implementation steps for the new way of working together. In fact, because success seemed to depend on a shared commitment, it even changed how work was prioritized at the beginning of the process. Ultimately, it wasn't the customer that was bad, but the relationships weren't effective enough.

In the example described above, the catalyst was a process rule that we added to the right column of the Kanban wheel. It transferred the value Customer Focus to the whole process. To transfer such implementation to your processes, look at your board with a few specific questions. From right to left and column by column:

Whose needs are examined in this part of the process? Whose needs are not addressed and what are the risks? (Also treat internal stakeholders as customers if they have a veto right.)
What do we learn in this phase that we could not already know or learn in an earlier phase? In what way do the activities in this phase help us to achieve what we need or the customer needs?
What else do we need to learn? Can we better address ambiguities going forward or backward in the process?

By working with this logic at the beginning of the process, you develop knowledge so that you meet customer needs which you still have to discover and explore. It is no longer a matter of meeting given requirements. Don't overly trust a secure process to do your job. Instead, look for ways to learn more effectively. It's also about a mental shift from the past (what the customer originally told us) to the future (when you've met the customer's needs). Creative knowledge work is a process of knowledge development. Use your Kanban board to remember it over and over again: What do we not know?

If we look again at the extended core practice 3 Manage workflow to achieve consistency, punctuality and good economic results, and anticipate customer needs, we acknowledge that consistency of delivery and punctuality play an important role in the value of Workflow.

Manage the workflow to achieve consistency of delivery:

Consistency of delivery has a high esteem in the Kanban method. In some circles it borders on obsession, as the manager training at Toyota shows. The prospective managers observe production lines for hours and look for the slightest deviation from the ideal of uniformity. It becomes clear that you can and should improve any production process, no matter how smooth it is.

We begin with the question: How do we recognize that work begins to be in progress? There are a few signs of this:

A good number of work packages move between regular stand-up meetings. How many exactly and how often depends on the size of the work packages, the team size and the distance between meetings. It often feels reassuring to see movement every day. If progress is not well visible, it is advisable to divide large work packages into smaller (but valuable) work packages.
A good number of work packages are recognizably free of blockages relative to the number of available employees, so that current and future progress can be recognized.
You feel (and measure if necessary) that employees are completing work faster and more predictably. The lead times for work packages of the same type and size become shorter and they move within a narrower range.

If you cannot see these signs in your work process, you have a goal. If you think you can see these signs, ask yourself if you can further improve this workflow in terms of these broad measurement criteria.

In order to further improve your workflow in terms of consistency of delivery, you should also work backwards here. It forces you to focus on what you need for work to flow. Start again on the right side of your Kanban board and consider what keeps the work from sliding smoothly across the board to completion. Focus on the flow of work and ask yourself the following questions for each column:

How do work packages leave this process step? What criteria tell us that they are ready? How is this readiness signaled so that downstream action can be taken?
How much time do work packages usually spend in this state? How much time do they spend in active work as opposed to just waiting?
What are the biggest sources of unpredictability? Do they have their origin in work or waiting time? Are the relevant units waiting for internal availability or for external dependencies to dissipate?
How much capacity in this state is consumed by rework?
How do work packages arrive in this state? How do we know that they are ready for processing?

Both values Customer Focus and Workflow invite teams to consider a broader context. Kanban is not about individual production or team production alone. This means you shouldn't limit yourself to the problems you can solve alone. Rather, it challenges you to work with other people on larger problems that run through the overall system. Collaboration does not only help you to finish things. It ensures that your collaborative efforts focus on the essentials.

Manage the workflow to achieve punctuality:

Besides consistency of delivery, punctuality also plays an important role for the value Workflow, as the above-mentioned extended core practice 3 Manage the work flow to achieve consistency of delivery, punctuality and good economic results, and anticipate customer needs demonstrates.

The management of the workflow does not only consist of the removal of emerging obstacles. In knowledge work, the work packages differ greatly from one another in terms of both content and value. In addition, the workload fluctuates enormously over the course of time. So there is always a place where you can actively control work.

Although Kanban has committed itself to self-organization, it is advisable to accompany the most important work packages more closely. Some work packages deserve more attention from management than others. Especially important deadlines should be met. It's okay for high-value work packages to bypass queues if you can justify it with a business benefit, even if overall predictability suffers.

How do core practices relate to Kanban principles?

The core practices put the Kanban principles into daily action. The value leadership connects both: it needs transparency, balance, collaboration, customer focus and flow, the values behind the six practices. The remaining values understanding, agreement and respect stand for the three change management principles: start with what you do now; agree to pursue evolutionary change; encourage acts of leadership at all levels. Part I explains all 6 principles and 9 values: Kanban principles and Kanban values.

Every core practice offers opportunities for leadership. When the board shows a blocker, any team member can raise it and propose a change to the system. The better you make these improvements visible and repeatable, the more they shape your company culture.

How do you apply the core practices in Merlin Project?

With Kanban you focus on flow and on finishing tasks. The method fits into existing organizations because it respects current roles, titles and hierarchies.

In the Kanban board in Merlin Project you choose a template for the columns, such as Simple Kanban, Software Development or Editor, or you create your own status values. Each status value maps to a completion percentage: when you drag a card into the next column, the activity takes on that value, and the Gantt chart shows the new progress immediately. You create a new card with ⌘N.

For the practice "limit work in progress", you can set a Minimum Count and a Maximum Count of cards for each status value. If a column contains more cards than allowed, Merlin Project reports a strong conflict; if it contains too few, a weak one. You structure large boards with a second grouping into swimlanes. The article Kanban with priority shows how to sort cards by priority as well.

Swimlanes in the Kanban board of Merlin Project

This is what each core practice looks like in a project:

Visualize: The board shows the project team's workflow and where cards get stuck.
Limit WIP: Less parallel work makes the team resolve bottlenecks together instead of starting new tasks.
Manage flow: Project managers and their team steer how quickly tasks get finished, not how quickly new ones start.
Make policies explicit: Classes of service such as expedite, priority and fixed date define which card gets pulled first.
Implement feedback loops: Standup, replenishment and retrospective compare expected with actual results.
Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally: The team discusses difficulties at the board, proposes changes and checks their effect.

Stop starting, start finishing! This phrase sums up the core practices. It keeps tasks from sitting at 90 percent for weeks without being completed. Kanban does not solve every challenge in a project; decisions, trade-offs and complexity remain. But it shows you where your work is stuck.

If you have any questions about this blog article or would like to discuss it, we look forward to your contribution in our forum.