Replenishment - A Kanban Single

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We had the idea for this book while thinking about the great KLRIS event, organized, of course, by David J Anderson and made the approach more concrete during and after this event. Thanks again to David and his team for coming up with this great event and thus the inspiration! (The KLRIS event is also brilliantly covered in a free eBook ‚Quotable Kanban‘. )

Some note on the cover photo and the title of this book. Standing in front of the famous Geysir Stokkur (and in fact bigger, but younger brother of the actual Geysir ‚Geysir‘) and being still inspired by two full days of discussing Kanban and its future it was obvious that this is one of the most brilliant examples of replenishment. And also, what is the whole of Kanban without proper replenishment? What happens downstream if upstream doesn’t work and what is more upstream than replenishment? Indeed, Kanban leads us the way to exploit the opportunities of clever replenishment.  Read more on this in in ‚Project Development vs. Product Development’. So, rather than going for a shallow effect of showing the eruption, we go for the deep result of serious, powerful, value defining replenishment.

We hope you enjoy and have fun reading our (still) small eBook and don’t forget to give us feedback! It’s appreciated!  

Arne & Markus, 

Hamburg & Potsdam, October 2011

• WIP Limits: With Kanban getting more and more widespread, WIP (WIP = „work in progress“) limits have become a well known concept. Represented as numbers on top of the columns they are the most prominent feature of a Kanban board. But these column limits are not the only way to limit WIP. This article is about the purpose of limiting WIP, which options there are to do so and which effects can often be observed and achieved after limiting WIP. ...
• Guarantee bandwidth for intangibles (to address sustainability of your business): If your business is not supposed to be a one hit wonder, but a long standing product or service you need to embrace the concept of sustainability. Of course, there are many aspects. Check if one fits for you. For agile software development to really work, one of many things you need is a constant effort curve. That means whenever in your project or product life cycle you decide to implement a feature - the effort should roughly be the same. This is hard to achieve out of many reasons - one reason being the normally growing complexity and inflexibility of a platform, product or project. The least you need is to ‘manage’ (although it is somehow the wrong word!) your technical debt to achieve this effect. ...

• Tools for Kanban: When introducing Kanban to a team or implementing it in an organization, one first and most often asked question is „Which tool should I use?“. You can expect this in a discipline that is used to build tools for others and itself all of the time, where effectively it’s the disciplines business. But before starting a tool evaluation, you should ask yourself if you really need an electronic tool for what you want to do. Or is a physical board - a wall full of post-its - the better choice? Or is the best choice to use both, an electronic and a physical tool at the same time? These answers are not easy to answer and even not in short time, because many vectors are influencing the choice and a lot of it depends on the concrete context of the team or organization. Following, we collected the most important advantages and disadvantages of electronic tools to help you with such a decision. ...
• Project Development vs. Product Development: If Kanban is a perfect fit for complex Product Development, with the benefits of increased quality, better cycle time and throughput - why shouldn't it be a great fit for developing one off projects? People tend to think that limited predictability limits the scope of Kanban. This chapter shows why this belief is a fallacy.  

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