Key Benefits of Kanban

• Improved delivery speed

• Alignment between business goals and execution

• Improved Predictability

• Improved scaling and dependency management

• Increasing customer satisfaction

• Exploring Kanban's Impact on Organizational Psychology

Based on the information gathered from the comparison of the Western companies’ reports on the state of management Kanban with the original concept, the factors driving the implementation of the choice of the Kanban method are transparency and constant improvement of work. Hence, it is logical to talk about some advantages of applying Kanban in current organisations.

Critical Benefits of Kanban:

• Increased flow visibility;

• Improved delivery speed;

• Alignment between goals and performance;

• Improved forecasting and planning;

• Improved dependency management;

• Increasing customer satisfaction.

• Increased flow visibility

The main idea of ​​the Kanban methodology is to visualize each of its parts. Consequently, the content of the Kanban board is expressed in a single page where people can grasp all the information in one go. All tasks are also easily seen and even if they are complicated, they are not hidden and this makes the work easy and transparent. Every member of the teams can immediately receive or update about the status of each work or project.

Improved delivery speed

Kanban offers project managers several ways to monitor and analyze work allocation closely. Having a clear understanding of:

• work items completed in a given period;

• stages that take the most time;

• easy to identify bottlenecks. This allows teams to address production flow alignment issues to improve workflow and delivery speed.

Alignment between business goals and execution

Kanban method encourages feedback and has review meetings; this means that the strategic plan of the company is implemented as a process that is connected with the day-to-day work of the teams. Therefore this forces a good alignment between the business direction and its execution which enhances the organization’s flexibility. This makes it possible for teams to look at the changing priorities within what they are supposed to achieve within the strategy and the constant reshuffling that is normal when dealing with market or customers forces.

Improved Predictability

When work items accumulate at the Kanban board, the line manager is able to visualize his process through flow analytics. Working on the tasks’ cycle time let’s increase the expectations for the amount of work done in the future. Knowledge of variance in Throughput or consistency of delivery speed will make the forecast more effective and the basis for decision based on historical data more accurate.

Improved scaling and dependency management

As it was described in the Kanban culture section, this internal visualization practice is used when mapping and managing the dependencies. Principle one is known as starting where you are doing now meaning that in a system there are existing dependencies and conveyor between them need to be visualized.

Dependency management provides insight into the current state of the workflow and ideas for improvement. On the other hand, it also provides complete transparency for the strategic management of the workflow and existing relationships between teams.

Increasing customer satisfaction

The history of the Kanban method, or, to be more precise, the pull system that is at the root of it, means that a set of production tasks (works) is to be accomplished whenever there is a demand for it. In other words, Kanban causes managers and participants to declutter their workstream by focusing solely on work that is required at any one time. Besides, through the use of visuals and depicting some of the restriction principles in the work-in-process limitation process, the manager guarantees the result meets the client’s expectation.

Exploring Kanban's Impact on Organizational Psychology

Yet, you may have encountered ‘simple and straightforward’ pieces of software often used at work that in fact introduce more work for a knowledge worker. That being said, should you start with the use of Kanban?

To understand this, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does your brain always feel like it has a million tabs open?

• Do you constantly switch from one task to another, struggling to focus on making progress?

• Do you feel like you work non-stop but are never as productive as you would like?

• Is your team struggling to communicate, causing issues like duplication of effort, defects, rework, and more?

If yes, to these questions, then, the possibility of Kanban power might help came into view. Apparently, a considerable number of knowledge workers personally experience freedom via use of Kanban.

Employees of today carry phone and tablets but most information is in text format. Text is everywhere. As with all email, chat, and both formal and casual communications, it may be double or even triple to keep track of what, is to be accomplished and when. Even though textual information may be appropriate in some occasions, it is not appropriate to use in all the cases. The efficiency of perception of textual information is lower than it has been hoped for. Why?

For several reasons, I think that processes of perception can be described and expressed with the help of the statement that a picture is worth a thousand words. It is seen that the brain categorizes visualization 60,000 times faster compared to text.

Thus, it was discovered that regarding the nerve fibers 40% from the entire cerebral matter is linked to the retina. According to the studies, we receive visuals as our primary input in our brain, and this counts to 90% of the flow. This means that the brain is inclined to work with pictures than having to work hard to parse through text.

In this regard, Kanban has been used well as a tool to map work flow. Kanban converts what is usually provided in words into easy, appealing pieces of candy for the brain. They start all “tasks” as cards on the board as Kanban does and this will help clarify what is important and work on the most important items. By having the Kanban board, all the persons involved can always find the updated information on the processes being carried.

In essense, if applied the right way, the Kanban system can help the teams spend much less time in meeting which are labelled as the pure acts of organisational or project rearrangement. This means that teams can spend a lot more time ‘doing’ than they would ‘discussing’ the work.

Kanban eliminates the variation and optimizes the signals in order to decrease the waste and increase the value. Watching how the work of the team goes allows to report on the accomplished work and boost the information sharing. It also enhances all aspects of resource except for the work environment and occasionally, even the comfort of the work environment.

Therefore, seen from a psychological perspective, the introduction of Kanban practices, and particularly, the Kanban board as a method of visualizations, is the way that positively affects project-based work of team members by minimizing irrational loads on the cognitive substrate and easing the work of perceiving and memorizing work-related information.