Kanban as an Approach for the IT Industry

The set of practices commonly referred to as Kanban originated in 2006 in the software engineering department at Corbis, a media licensing company owned by Bill Gates. David J. Anderson implemented a Kanban pull system with great results, which became the Kanban Method over time.

Those practices spread to a diverse international community that over the years continued to enhance and evolve the approach, achieving great success as an alternative path to agility. Like Scrum, XP, Lean, or Agile, Kanban is one of the methodologies available in the market today to improve software development and other knowledge-based work.

Although it started in the software industry, Kanban is a method for defining, managing, and improving all sorts of services delivering knowledge work, such as HR, design, or product management.

The method is based on the concept of a Kanban System — a delivery flow system that controls the amount of work in progress using visual signals. The visual signals are referred to as kanbans, which, together with the policies associated with them, create a pull system, where work is “pulled” from the upstream process when other work is completed, rather than “pushed” based on a production plan.