Field Notes · Elle Anderson · andersonco.ukKanban in a nutshell
Second of three short pieces on ways of working, following Scrum and leading into flow. Kanban is the method I reach for most, partly because it starts without a fight.
Start where you are
Kanban's opening move is unique among methods: change nothing. No new roles, no reorganisation, no ceremony calendar. Take the process you already have, make every piece of work in it visible on a board, and agree as a group what the columns and rules actually are. Most teams discover in the first hour that they hold wildly different beliefs about how their own work works, and that discovery is worth more than any framework rollout I have ever seen.
The board is not the method
Plenty of teams have a board and none of the benefit, because the board is just a window. The method is what you do through it: limit work in progress, pull work rather than accept pushes, and make your policies explicit enough that a newcomer could follow them. The WIP limit is the part everyone resists and the part that does the work. When a column is full, the correct response is to finish something, help someone, or improve the system, and never to start something new. Stop starting, start finishing is the entire philosophy in five words.
Manage the flow, not the people
Once work is visible and limited, the interesting questions change. How long do items actually take, door to door? Where do they wait, and for whom? How old is the oldest thing on the board, and why is nobody worried about it? Blocked items get flagged and aged in public. The invisible workload, the support, the favours, the incidents, goes on the board too, because a board that hides half the work is a fiction with columns. None of this requires estimating anything.
Improve at a cadence
Kanban reviews the system, not the people. A short regular look at the flow data, one policy changed at a time, and the humility to treat every change as an experiment that might be reversed. It is hypothesis-driven working applied to your own process, which is why it compounds: teams that run it for a year are unrecognisable, and nobody can point to the day anything dramatic happened.
Where it curdles
A board with no WIP limits is status wallpaper. Columns that map to job titles quietly rebuild the silos the board was meant to dissolve. And a board nobody replans from becomes an archaeology exhibit, updated the hour before the review. The tell in every case is the same: the board describes the work, but no longer changes it.