Lean

Kanban is designed to help your processes, not define them. Along the way, it can provide enormous value to projects and teams, including improved focus, efficiency, communication, prioritization and visibility. Here is an overview of these benefits and tips for realizing them as you implement Kanban into your project work.

After showing how Kanban is applied to small projects and larger-scale initiatives up to three months in duration, our series concludes with a detailed look at the challenges and benefits of bringing Kanban to longer projects in multi-team environments. It starts with enabling a shared understanding of reality.

As Kanban is applied to longer projects up to three months in duration, the principles of visibility, flow, variability and improvement are still in full effect, but challenges must be taken into account, including larger teams and higher-level sponsors, increased uncertainty and complexity, and, by extension, greater organizational pressures.

An equipment manufacturer is turning away new business. An airline is delaying flights due to maintenance issues. A homebuilder is struggling with a regulatory-driven software implementation. Here is a look at how three companies turned to Critical Chain to fix debilitating project management problems.

The Critical Chain approach to executing projects has been compared to Lean, which also shares common ground with Agile-related techniques such as Kanban. Is there untapped synergy between Critical Chain and Agile methods? A recent conference helped to shine light on their similarities and key differences.

Context matters when applying a Kanban approach to your projects. In the second installment of our series, we look at the interplay of four Kanban tenets — visibility, flow, variability and improvement — when leading smaller projects with shorter durations.