Key Principles of Kanban were Defined: Past 2010

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a modern Agile Methodology that focuses on continuous improvement and efficient workflow using the visual approach of listing out the project activities....

Purpose and Significance

Since Kanban has come into existence for efficient management of projects and ensuring their delivery, it has its core purpose in improving the overall productivity of the Project Execution and making it seamless across all its phases....

The Roots of Kanban: 1600s

The roots of the Kanban date back to the 1600s during which there was a lot of social upheaval and military conflicts in Japan. This caused the downfall of the local businesses and thus they needed to enhance their customer satisfaction to survive in the market. Due to this, business owners felt the need to follow the standard principles to manage their business activities. Also, they need to follow a structured approach to enhance their consumer satisfaction within the budget but without compromising the quality. This is the reason why the term ‘Kanban’ was born. This term was used to visually denote the various business activities for managing the business activities....

Origin of Kanban and Early Beginnings: 1940s

The word ‘Kanban’ is made of two Japanese words namely ‘Kan’ which means sign and ‘Ban’ which means ‘Board.’ Thus, it refers to the ‘Visual Card’ or ‘Visual Signal.’ Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer, started Kanban in the 1940s, as a simple planning system for automotive manufacturing in Toyota Automotive, one of the leading automobile manufacturers. At that time, Kanban was primarily used as a simple plan to control and manage the inventory of the production system. The main purpose of developing the Kanban was the lower throughput of the manufacturing facilities of Toyota. Thus, to stand ahead in the market competition, Kanban helped the company manage all types of inventory of finished, semi-finished, and raw materials. This helped the organization to achieve its goals along with adaptive planning and flexibility. In this way, Toyota was able to manage all the production systems from the supplier to the end users with optimum efficiency....

Evolution of Kanban: 1940-1950s

One of the most popular principles that Toyota Automotive used to implement in its production was ‘Lean Manufacturing.’ It is a production system that aims to reduce the wastage of the resources as well as the response time from the supplier to consumers. Kanban was originally used in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing Systems to attain production efficiency. After becoming the Director in the year 1959, Taiichi Ōno identified that overproduction was the cause of waste as customer demands may vary over time. He started experimenting with the different principles to improve production efficiency and started using paper cards for signaling production within his factory. He named this new method ‘Kanban’ in which a Kanban card was attached to each product on the shop floor in each of its sales. Once the number of Kanban cards reached a certain threshold, the production of that product was started. Hence, the main focus was to produce only what was needed....

Transition to Software Development: 2003-2008

Originating as a part of Manufacturing innovations, Kanban extended its popularity to other sectors like software development and the healthcare sector. The main reason for this was the popularity of Toyota’s Production System which was based on the ‘Kanban’ method. The application of Kanban made Toyota a global competitor in the market. Due to this, various other industries tried to implement the core logic of Toyota’s Kanban principles into their system. And, during the same time, Software Industry also witnessed a shift in the requirements due to which Agile Manifesto was published in the year 2001. It highlighted various principles such as Scrum and Lean Software Development. Therefore, during the years 2003 to 2008, software professionals started using visual boards which were called ‘Kanban Boards’ to manage their Projects related to Software Development. This is how the ‘Kanban’ which came out of Japan’s automotive sector transitioned into the Software Industry....

Some Notable Contributions in Kanban: 2007-2009

Many pioneers and organizations made significant contributions to spreading awareness about the Kanban Methodology and making it a globally adopted methodology of Agile Software Development. Marry and Tom Poppendieck were the first people to spread knowledge about Kanban in software development. They made their contributions through conferences and publishing books on topics such as Value Stream Mapping, Queuing Theory, and Visual Workspace which formed the foundation of the Kanban for Software Development. After this, Microsoft started using the Kanban principles in software development-based projects. It started using the elements of the Scrum and Kanban methods in the existing methods through which the first Scrumban project became successful in the year 2004. Apart from this, David Anderson, who was working at Microsoft started making his contributions to the Agile principles. In 2007, he left Microsoft and collaborated with Dominica DeGrandis, who is one of the top Kanban experts now. They introduced the ‘Kanban system for change request processing’ that helped the teams remove the time-boxed iterations in the project. This was followed by some more contributions and in September 2007, Karl Scotland, Engineering Program Manager at Yahoo, introduced Kanban to this team. Due to these contributions, Kanban became popular and gained momentum in the year 2009....

Key Principles of Kanban were Defined: Past 2010

After Kanban became significantly popular by the year 2009, many other contributions were made through journals, books, conferences, etc. Finally, in the year 2016, a book named ‘Essential Kanban Condensed’ by David J Anderson and Andy Carmichael was published. It highlighted the key practices of the Kanban Methodology in software project management....

Conclusion

Kanban came into existence as a part of the Lean Manufacturing System in the Automotive organization and became an integral part of modern software development projects. Throughout its evolution, the various contributions have refined it so that it can provide a perfect foundation for managing projects. The Agile and DevOps teams can easily implement the Kanban Methodology using tools such as Jira and Trello to execute the Agile Workflows for their projects....