Kanban in Agile: Achieving Organizational Agility

Achieving business agility takes hard work and the right set of organizational tools and methods. It is not a small undertaking, but when done right, your business organization and productivity will greatly improve. This is where Kanban can come in handy. Kanban is an Agile methodology that can help you visualize and manage work better. Using Kanban in agile project management can help streamline your business processes and make the most of your time and resources. To help you effectively use the Kanban approach in Agile, here are six best practices that you can follow.

1. Scale Kanban

Implementing Kanban in Agile means more than just adding Kanban cards on a Kanban board. It is a system that enables you to organize all tasks within your teams and improve coordination across departments. So if you want to make the most of your Kanban method in Agile setup, your first move should be to scale your Kanban approach across your organization. 

Building interconnecting Kanban boards will make it easier for everyone in your team to keep track of all your pending tasks and be able to better strategize how to improve your organizational agility. By interconnecting your Kanban boards, you also get to execute strategic plans and easily adapt to the needs of your organization.

2. Turn managers into Agile teachers

To make Kanban in Agile work for your organization, it takes more than just tools and strategies. The most important aspect is manpower. This is why everyone in your organization should be well-equipped with the knowledge to implement the Kanban Agile development methodology, especially your team managers.

As team leaders, they should become highly familiar with how Kanban works, and be able to pass down the knowledge to their team members. Their knowledge about Kanban in Agile will also help them become better task leaders, making sure that all tasks are accomplished as expected. Your team leaders should also take on the task of becoming Kanban coaches within your team, making sure that the process is followed properly and that the flow of tasks are maintained.

3. Encourage a horizontal leadership

Many companies implement a hierarchical leadership in their organization, wherein every decision made comes from the top down. But for an organization to become more agile and to be able to generate value better, horizontal leadership should be fostered. This involves constant collaboration across all teams and from among all members.

Kanban in Agile values a collaborative environment, wherein everyone pitches in starting from ideation to implementation. This allows everyone to be more resourceful, to think outside the box and encourage them to contribute innovative ideas that will help the organization become more productive and achieve their business goals more efficiently.

4. Value customer feedback

No matter what kind of business you have, you should always keep in mind that what fuels your business is your customer base. And with that in mind, you should also see to it that you gear your organizational improvements towards the benefit of your customers. To do that, customer feedback is necessary. The implementation of Kanban in agile teams can help you better manage your customer feedback and their implementation.

By gathering feedback, you can get a better idea of which improvements you can apply to help you achieve organizational agility. Collate all feedback, put them in Kanban cards for a better visual and transform these cards into actionable items. This will help you better target each customer’s feedback, especially the ones that are more urgent and more in demand.

5. Eliminate waste

One of the goals of implementing a lean process is delivering value by eliminating waste. Waste, or Muda in Japanese, refers to any activity in a business process that does not add value to the delivery of a product or service for the customer. It can be anything that consumes your time and resources, but does not add any value to the final product. To properly implement Kanban in agile processes, waste should be eliminated. To start, you should take a closer look at your processes to identify if there are any wasteful activities included. Through a Kanban board, you can visualize your workflow and see what tasks or process steps are not adding value to your business.

6. Improve continuously through experiments

Continuous improvement is key to your organization’s growth. For this, you need to keep on experimenting. Through rapid experimentations, you can learn new things and gain actionable insights about your industry. Experimentations allow you to gather relevant data that will help you make informed business decisions. This also helps you implement Kanban in Agile as every experiment allows you to gather feedback to help you improve your future processes.

Conclusion

Kanban development for Agile teams has worked wonders for various organizations across various markets. Implementing Kanban in Agile organizations offers a variety of benefits that allow businesses to grow and be more productive. Organizational agility is important if you want to make the most of your resources. Using Kanban can be a great method for scaling Agile across the organization. This allows you to quickly adapt to the ever-changing demands of your market and stay ahead of the competition.