Embrace chaos - What Kanban can teach us

Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the team members. By matching the amount of work in progress to the team's capacity, kanban gives teams more flexible planning options, faster output, clear focus, and transparency throughout the development cycle. 

Kanban is rooted in four basic principles from which web development teams can benefit from:

1) Start from where you are now

The Kanban method does not prescribe a specific set of roles or process steps. The Kanban method starts with existing roles and processes. 

2) Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change

The team must agree that continuous, incremental and evolutionary change is the way to make system improvements and make them stick. This reduces risk of failure.

3) Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities and titles

Kanban attempts to eliminate initial fears by agreeing to respect current roles, responsibilities and job titles with the goal of gaining broader support.

4) Leadership at all levels

Acts of leadership at all levels in the organization, from individual contributors to senior management, are encouraged.

I will be presenting how these principles can be applied to Drupal Web projects and how they facilitate to manage change and ongoing improvements.  

This talk is for project managers, developers, leaders who like to start now improving their processes incrementally. Kanban principles can well be combined with existing agile methodology such as Scrum.