If your concept about lean thinking is clear, you must be aware that flow is one of the 14 principles of lean thinking which, in this case, represents how work items move through the process.
If there is good flow in the system, then the work will be moving seamlessly through the process, whereas bad workflow will mean that the work got stopped or started frequently during the process. You should know that the Kanban process can help you improve the flow, which we will address in this blog post.
Understanding the economics of your system
The Kanban system’s value for supporting the outcomes of a firm can vary widely, which makes it crucial for any firm to assess the economics of every system before using the metrics. By answering the below-mentioned questions, you can get a clear picture of the economy of your system.
Which type of outcomes is the system currently supporting?
You can think of a particular type of revenue-generating program that will help drive the organization or team—for example, an operation being used by the team to improve the user experience.
What are you looking to improve?
You will have to identify improvements not based on your gut feeling but based on the value you deliver. For example, a team might be looking forward to improving the product’s quality to avoid reworking it.
The different metrics -Work in Progress or Work in Process
If you keep tabs on the work that has been started but is still not completed, you will improve the flow of value through the entire process. Unfinished work will never add value to a team, firm, or customers.
You can take an example of a software development team that worked on a new feature. That feature will not add value to the team, customer, or organization if it does not go live. Tracking such works will allow you to improve your flow.
So, WIP refers to the work that has been already started but has yet not reached its last stage. WIP is mostly used to refer to Work In Progress, but in many cases, it is used for Work In Process as well.
Work In Progress refers to the total amount of work that you promised to complete but not complete at any one time. While on the other side, Work In Process means the total amount of active work at any one time.
You will have to use unfinished cards to know which works are still in Progress and not completed. This will further help you in improving the flow.
Queues
If the work has to keep waiting between two stages, then queues will be added to the process. So, Queues represent the total life cycle of most work items, which is why it becomes crucial to understand how they affect your team and the overall process.
If you succeed in minimizing the time work spent in queues, you will quickly reduce the overall cycle time and maintain workflow throughout the system. You will need to start using an efficiency diagram to know the difference between total WIP and the entire work waiting in the queue.
Blockers
You will get a blocker symbol which is used to represent those types of works that can no longer move up in the system. In most cases, the blocker represents the work dependent on external factors or some failure condition.
They are one of the most manageable elements to measure, even by newbies on a Kanban process board. To get started, you will have to keep tabs on the number of items in the blockers and then analyze how long they stay there. With a better understanding of the blocker, you will be able to improve the flow.
The main motive of flow is to maintain a continuous cycle of workflow that will motivate teams to keep moving the work more effectively through the process, and it is the Kanban process that will help you improve the same. Use the Kanban system’s various elements mentioned in this blog post to improve the workflow and streamline the process.