Pitfalls of Kanban Series

One of tricks I sometimes use when coaching teams that are starting with Kanban is I tell them why they shouldn’t adopt it. Challenging the team in such way helps me to indicate whether there is buy in as this is crucial thing to deal with issues the team will face.

I do that knowing that, thanks to its flexibility, Kanban is pretty vulnerable and even a single team member may cripple Kanban implementation, thus vastly reducing value the whole team gets from adopting the method. Besides getting buy in having knowledge of these potential vulnerabilities can be a game-changer as then the team can avoid them.

This was the idea which stood behind my session titled Kanban weak spots which I presented at Lean Kanban Central Europe last year.

Recently David Anderson started an email discussion that inspired me to write a follow-up on the subject. As I was typing an answer to David’s questions I realized that it would be worthwhile to discuss each and every pitfall in details, covering reasons why it may appear and tools that can be used to deal with it.

And this is how the idea of this series was born. You can expect a number of posts covering just a single Kanban weak spot. The whole list will be gathered here:

• Kanban Board Not Up To Date
• Abusing WIP Limits
• Wishful Thinking
• Stalled Board