Getting Started with Kanban

Getting Started

How do you Get Started with Kanban?

Kanban can appear to be deceptively simple. A lot of teams start with Kanban by just putting up a whiteboard and moving stickies across it. However, as explained in our Kanban guide, while Kanban appears simple, it provides some elegant tools and techniques based on Lean/ Agile principles and theories, which, when used effectively, bring you significant business benefits such as greater predictability, better throughput and quality, and reduced time to market.

The Kanban Method truly abstracts these principles for the benefit of knowledge teams and help them get these benefits. But it is important that you – and your team/ organization – learn about these principles and the associated benefits and apply them fully.

Read up!  

There is an enormous amount of resources available in the form of books and blogs. These are listed below.

Best Kanban Books:

1.David Anderson
2.Mike Burrows
3.Corey Ladas
4.Jim Benson

5.Yuval Yeret

6.Dan Vacanti

7.Don Reinertsen

8.Mattias Skarin

9.Klaus Leopold, Siegfried Kaltenecker

10.Andrew Stellman and Margaret C. L. Greene

11.Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sundén Foreword by Jim Benson

12.Paul Klipp

13.Tonianne DeMaria Barry & Jim Benson

14.Henrik Kniberg

15.Raymond S. Louis

16.John M. Gross & ‎Kenneth R. McInnis

Other resources

Get some Training!

Reading the books and blogs is a great start. However, it would also help you and your teams a lot to get trained formally on implementing the Kanban Method in your organization.

We are very proud to be working with the Lean Kanban University under the guidance of David Anderson, as well as a number of other consultants/ trainers/ coaches around the world. These people and institutions provide accredited Kanban training, which, we believe, is invaluable for the successful adoption of Kanban in your organization.

Digité itself also provides accredited Kanban training, with a small but highly experienced set of AKTs (Accredited Kanban Trainers) and AKCs (Accredited Kanban Consultants) on our staff.

To learn more about your training and coaching options, please visit our Training page.

Get Started With Kanban!

Once you have armed yourself and your team with sufficient knowledge, start with your first Kanban board with your team. Choose a process or a set of deliverables you would like to manage using the Kanban board and start building it.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes! Kanban is a system that encourages experimentation. If things don’t seem to go well, make changes in your Kanban system until they start to make sense.

Once you go past the basics, you can then start to go to the more advanced aspects of designing and working your “Kanban system” in order to better design your operations and to achieve better outcomes in terms of throughput, quality and lead times, so that you can start to make better commitments to your customers – internal or external.

Additional questions you may have –

Check out some of the great resources on the left side of this page. You can also sign up for an upcoming webinar on Kanban – or look at some great previous webinars conducted by people such as David Anderson and several other thought leaders!

Or, if you want to explore SwiftKanban, you can check out our rich set of features or perhaps signup for a free trial!

Signup for updates!

Visualize your workflow and manage your work in an Easy and Intuitive way.

Try our Enterprise Plan FREE for 30 days.