Bad reasons to adopt Kanban

David Anderson recently posted Why do we use Kanban?

He proposes two lists, one entitled ‘Why do we use Kanban’ and a second entitled ‘We do not use Kanban because’, the second list contains complimentary practices that are themselves not a reason to adopt Kanban. For instance it is not necessary to adopt Kanban if all you want to do is dispense with iterations.

The thing I found really interesting about this post is that the reasons my team first adopted a kanban system were drawn almost entirely from the second list. In particular our dissatisfaction with time boxing.

This may, in part, be due to us coming at this very much from a software development perspective, rather than considering the entire value stream.

David lists the following as reasons for practising Kanban

Evolutionary, incremental change with minimal resistance

Achieve sustainable pace by balance throughput against demand

Quantitative Management and emergence of high maturity behavior in alignment with senior management desire to have a highly predictable business

Better risk management (the emerging theme in the Kanban community)

It’s only through practising kanban and learning more about the lean principles underpinning it that the real benefits such as improved risk management and greater predictability have become apparent.