Disciplined Mapping and Monitoring of Work in Progress

As organizations move beyond basic Scrum, it becomes useful to mix in Lean as a way to support improvements in quality and productivity.

Kanban is the Lean technique most often used to implement Lean’s requirement to visualize and map workflow across a value stream. Kanban emphasizes examining “work in progress” (WIP), defining how much WIP exists in a system at present, and then gradually imposing limits on WIP to expose delays that are limiting throughput.

Kanban systems typically use a physical Kanban board that looks something like this: