The Lean Life: Kanban Case Studies
Eldon Kao
What is it?
Simply put, Kanban is a visual management tool originating from Toyota in the 1940's that was developed to improve production throughput by aligning resources with demand. In it's most basic form a Kanban board tracks items using three columns: To do, In progress and Completed as depicted in the example above. The simple nature and ease of interpretation of the Kanban tool allows it to be used in a variety of settings to organize and track countless tasks. Of course, both the Kanban cards and board can be customized to add more processing steps and details as required.
The following are two examples of Kanban being used at work and at home:
Case Study 1:
Alicia Lawrence from Entrepreneur.com described the use of Kanban in Content Marketing, proving that the system is suitable for industries outside car manufacturing. The advantages of using Kanban cards and board over a traditional calendar is that a tasks are visual and can be easily tracked. Traditional calendar layouts may show deadlines but will comprise of multiple events that are hard to follow and may be lost in the shuffle.
Case Study 2:
Storm Fagan from alphr.com described the use of Kanban to organize her kids at home with only two columns: To do and Done. Kanban cards (Post-it Notes) were created for each task that included a mix of chores, homework, appointments, and fun activities. The advantages to using this technique with children is that it is easy to follow and creates a sense of accomplishment when seeing the "To do" column fill up. This approach helps kids prioritize and gives them some autonomy to complete tasks on their own.
More applications?
From the examples, you can appreciate that Kanban is simple and easy to deploy for a variety of applications. Let me in the comments below how else you have used this system!
Related Notes: You can read more about Kanban here and here.