Seeing the work

Kanban starts with one thing: put every piece of work on a board where everybody can see it, in the column representing its current state.

Why that alone changes things. Work that exists only in somebody's head or inbox is invisible to everybody else. Nobody knows what is in progress, what is waiting, or where things are stuck. The first time a team puts its real work on a board, the usual reaction is surprise at how much there is.

Columns represent your actual process, not an idealised one. If work genuinely waits for approval, there is a waiting for approval column. Drawing the process as it is rather than as it should be is the point, because you cannot improve a process you have not described honestly.

One card per piece of work, with enough detail to know what it is and who is on it.

Then watch where cards accumulate. A column with eight cards in it and a column with one is telling you exactly where the constraint is, and that is usually not where people assumed.

Waiting is the thing to look for. In most processes, work spends far more time waiting than being worked on, and the waiting is invisible until it is drawn. Speeding up the working parts while ignoring the waiting is the commonest improvement effort and it achieves very little.

Start with your process as it is, change nothing else, and look at it for two weeks before improving anything.