LeanKit Kanban - Lean Process Management

Optimize the Flow of Work

Build visual models of any process in just minutes

Create lanes to represent the stages in your workflow and note cards to represent work items. Drag-and-Drop the cards through the lanes as work moves from one stage to another. This simple model makes it easy to see the status of everyone's work.

Create sub-lanes to represent different teams, paralell work, classes of service, or anything else you can think of. Inlude buffer lanes in between handoff stages, and manage the buffer size with Work In Process (WIP) Limits.

Identify and Alleviate Bottlenecks

Every process has bottlenecks. LeanKit Kanban makes it easy to spot them (hard to miss them, in fact) and provides a sophisticated Work-In-Process constraint that will allow you to exploit those bottlenecks, balancing demand against throughput, even as you seek to release the bottleneck and remove blocking issues.

Visual cues like blocked items, long queues, and empty spaces can provide leading indicators of problems before they happen, allowing you to act to prevent delays.

Easy to Use Inline Board Editor

Making changes to your process and workflow is quick and easy, using our inline board editor. Define new lanes, resize them, drag them around, divide them into sub-lanes, and manage Work-In-Process limits.

You can divide lanes into both vertical and horizontal sub-lanes, several levels deep - allowing you to model task breakdown, sub-workflows, and process handoffs with ease.

Real, Meaningful Metrics

Visualizing your work provides you with a tremendous amount of information. But there is even more information in the underlying the activities within your system. LeanKit Kanban captures all the information about how work is moving through the process as you work with the board and its cards. It provides you with the tools to analyize (and extract) that information and to answer key questions with real data:

"What is slowing us down? Where should we concentrate our improvement efforts?"
"How long will it take to release this critical item?" (without having to guess at it)
"What is the estimated release date for this feature?" (again, no more guessing)
"Who is overloaded?"
"How effective is our process?"
"How much variance do our processes have and what are the outliers?"
"What forward-looking warning indicators are telling us that we have trouble on the horizon?"

Features include the ability to:

Organizational-level analytics allow you to monitor the health of work across the entire company
Analyze the data from multiple views (by User, Card Type, Priority, Queue Size, Card Size)
Choose the Lanes and sublanes that you wish to include and exclude from your analysis
Rollup sublanes into their parent lanes for aggregate level reporting
Select the start and end lanes for calculating lead time and cycle time

Managing Flow: Cumulative Flow Diagram

When the goal of your process is to deliver a continuous flow of customer value as fast as possible, bottlenecks and increased Work-In-Process are the enemy. The Cumulative Flow diagram gives you a look into how well items are flowing through your system.

Bottlenecks and Backups show up as wide spots in the diagram. Batches of work that hit all at once show up as "stairsteps". Work that is stalled shows up as a horizontal line. It's a revealing look at just how smoothly things are running, and where you should focus your improvement efforts.

Lead Time and Cycle Time

Lead Time: How long does it take, from the moment the customer requests something, for us to deliver it?

Cycle Time: How long does it take, from the moment we start working on something, for us to deliver it?

Understanding Lead Time and Cycle Time is the key to effective planning and scheduling. Instead of relying on estimates and guesswork, you can plan based on past performance and real data.

Lead and Cycle time allow you to see the tangible results of process improvements you make along the way. Watching for fluctuations in Cycle time can reveal issues, too - like frequent expediting - that can negatively affect your speed to market.

Process Efficiency

How much of your Work In Process is really being actively worked on, and how much of it is waiting around?

How much partially completed work ("In-Process Inventory") do you have clogging up your system?

How much work is sitting around waiting for handoffs between departments?

Understanding the activity level in your process compared to the inventory level can reveal bottlenecks, overloaded resources, awkward handoffs, and reveal when too much work is being introduced into the system, exceeding its capacity.

Rising "In-Process Inventory" levels can provide a leading indicator of bottlenecks beginning to form, allowing you to anticipate process issues before they become serious.

Statistical Process Controls

Achieve a high level of maturity within your organization by understanding and measuring variability within your processes.

Identify and diagnose outliers to gain a better understanding of how to prevent them in the future.

Gain a high-level of certainty around promised delivery dates and build trust amoung all stakeholders.

Get quantitative evidence of the effectiveness of your imrovement initiatives.

Work Distribution

You'll be amazed at the insight you can get from these simple little pie charts:

"So, 75% of our work is Critical, 10% is High Priority, and only 15% is Normal. Does that sound reasonable?"

"Why is it that 2 of our 5 developers are loaded up with 80% of the work?"

"Are we really working on bugs 52% of the time? What can we do to get that number down?"

Organization-level Analytics

Gain a view into the health of your processes across the entire organization, not just the project level data.

Use the forward-looking Warning Indicators to identify potential problems and take action before they get out of contorl.

Gain insight into the activities of projects within your organization.

Compare and contrast cycle time variation across all projects within your organization.

Understand and monitor the "real" workload across all Activities(departments).

Collaborate in Real Time, from Anywhere

A Central Hub for Communication

Physical Kanban boards and sticky notes are great, as long as everyone is working in the same place. These days, however, your team is just as likely to be scattered out over five continents and eight time zones, so seamless communication and collaboration are critical to the success of the team.

LeanKit Kanban allows everyone on team, from all corners of the globe, to participate in the process on equal footing. The board acts as a central hub for team communication, including external clients, executives, and all the project stakeholders.

Email and RSS Notifications

It's easy to stay in touch with your team's progress. Simply subscribe to a board and you'll receive e-mail updates whenever anything important happens. You can also set up RSS feeds to get regular updates on any RSS-enabled device.

You can subscribe to the entire board or just individual lanes. Say, for example, the QA department only wants notifications when there are new items ready for them to pick up. They could subscribe to the QA: Ready lane, and only get notified of the events they care about.

When someone gets stuck and marks a card as "blocked" your team can be notified, and scramble to help remove the blockage.

When someone overrides a Work-In-Process Limit, they'll have to provide a reason, and everyone will be notified. If there is a problem beginning to form, everyone knows about it instantly.

"A Placeholder for a Conversation"

Someone once said that "A Story Card is a placeholder for a conversation". With LeanKit Kanban, your team members scattered around the world can have that conversation, right on the card.

Your team can keep conversations and notes on individual work tasks to keep each other aware of issues, questions, and problems associated with the work. Regardless of your team members' locations, everyone has access to the most up-to-date information.

Features Listing

Map complex processes with swimlanes and sublanes
Specify WIP Limits at any level and have these limits rollup from bottom to top
Inline WYSIWYG Board Editor
Define Lane Types for efficiency analysis
Manage risk with Classes of Service and explicit policies
Divide Backlog and Archive for planning and post-process analysis
Export Work Items and History
Import Work Items from external systems using a flexible wizard process
Flexible API for system integration
Mark Blocked Work Items with a reason that is communicated to the team
Assign users to Work Items with visual icons
Define Work Items Types
Create custom Card Types that match your process
Define Work Items Priority (Critical, High, Normal, and Low)
Define Work Item Size and Due Date
Highly flexible visualization with either card color or icons
Create extensive details about a card with rich text editing and hyperlinks
Carry on conversations for a Work Item with Card Comments
View the entire history of a Work Item
Subscribe to the Board events through either email or RSS
View dynamic board updates as activity occurs on a Board
Extensive search capabilities within a Board (hide or dim filtered Cards)
Move Work Items with easy to use drop and drag interface
Convenient context menu options

Powerful Organizational-level Analytics provide company-wide health status
Flexible Process Mapping
Virtual Kanban for distributed teams
Built and tested for touch screen monitors
Support for all major browsers
Simple to start, powerful when you need it