I know I've heard the idea before. I was in a reading group about reading the book called "The Goal" (I didn't read the book unfortunately and it's sitting on my bookshelf). But we talked about how the book talked about eliminating bottlenecks.
I've been kanban-curious for a little while now. My blog might indicate that my interest started about two weeks shy of a month now, and I was hoping to try kanban in about a month back then. (Our team almost did this week, but let's not go there today.) But I've been fumbling around like an idiot about the whole thing, almost with this intuitive notion that it will somehow help the team (or at least give us a new way to look at breaking some habits) but I've had no idea why. I've sort of gotten the idea that we can easily point out bottlenecks, and bring ourselves to collaborate and get things done right at the right moment.
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I sometimes sense this recurring theme at random times that collaboration, and work getting done happen right at the best possible time whether we like it or not (and whether we use kanban boards or not). More concretely, people tend to fixate on something (an arbitrary date, or a significant related event) and wait for it to happen. Then whatever it is that everyone was waiting for just happens (and yet we still act surprised). But this fate-based theory usually leaves me with a visualization of a lot of people just waiting for something unexpected to happen--wasting a lot of time. Perhaps I can disprove this idea by having a simple way of having the group show themselves when the right time is for certain events to happen. Or maybe I'm just drinking too much of the kanban kool-aid now.
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Anyways...I've read Jeff Patton's article on Oversimplified Kanban many times now. I've lost count. I don't know why it's taken me so many times to get through it. I keep jumping to the other articles on Kanban as well, but end up back here because it seems like the right starter kit (which is right where I'm at now). Eventually we can try out some ideas from David Anderson or Arlo Belshee, but Jeff Patton's approach is more familiar to what our team is used to. Or perhaps we just tune the WIP limits and columns until it just works.
Now back to the title. I've skipped over this part of Jeff Patton's blog for sometime, and finally hit on what I've been looking for all along. Heijunka. This is the process of smoothing and leveling until everything is produced at a constant and predictable rate.
Then from there, we see if we can play with our constraints even more to see if it's possible to increase the rate. I'm guessing we can also find other ways outside of the kanban system to improve the rate (training, automating, eliminating waste, and probably more) all the while detecting the unevenness that returns to see if we're making the right improvements. It seems like it'll be a challenge to find the right zoom level of a timespan to say what's smooth and what isn't. Perhaps this changes too as we get more and more smooth.
Smooth or not, I really like the concreteness of everything I'm hearing about kanban. The way it is tuned is so simple. We actually know for sure if we are actually making a change. Some unmentioned experts might refer to these limits as training wheels, but they're experts, I'm not.
Looking at how we work right now, it's easy to just say...it's working, why change it? I'm looking at this opportunistically to say that we are at the best possible moment for being able to tell if this is a change for the better. If it is, and I'm letting the opportunity pass me by, then I'm simply wasting more. If it isn't, then at least that's one more thing to reflect back on, and find other ways to improve.
Well...There are a few details I still need to work out to be honest. As others teams are using what we're doing now as a model to get started, this is going to be quite a shift. Probably not one that others just getting started are ready for. And there are already some contexts that I know we have dealt with where I fear this won't work--at least not given what I currently know about kanban. Just give me two more weeks and I'll try to work out the details.
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