Lean. Part 1. Kanban board in a new way

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About three months ago, as the head of the design studio, I was fortunate enough to participate in the wonderful training “Fundamentals of Lean Production”. This training talked about lean methodology. For those who are not in the know, this is a methodology for “degreasing” business processes, which reduces unavoidable losses, eliminates useless actions and performs other manipulations aimed at increasing the speed of the company, the number of products or services and, as a result, growth her income. That is, in short.

What I want to share with you today is the result of the implementation of only a small part of the knowledge gained at this training. If you are interested in this topic - I am ready to talk about other things that we began to use in our studio after this training. By the way, it is very interesting to read posts on the topic lean of our Siberian colleagues - the Sibiriks company. Guys, keep it up!

So, today we will talk about two components of the wonderful lean methodology - this is visualization and kanban. The first of them says that you need to try to visualize everything and everything in business processes in order to simplify their perception and understanding. With the second concept, I think, many habrayuzery are familiar for a long time and firsthand. On Habré there were not a few articles about kanban boards and other similar project management tools. I want to talk about how we discovered the kanban board and how it became useful to us. Perhaps you can learn from our experience and implement this thing in your company.

Just a little theory. On cats apples


If you will, I want to give a free description of the concept of "kanban." At least as I understand it. Kanban is a work system that allows you to organize the principle of pulling by the customer. Very clearly this system is shown by the following illustration.

The principle of operation on the kanban system

Buyers (customers can say) take apples from a basket in a supermarket. As soon as the apples in the basket run out, the supermarket employee brings a new full basket, which he takes in the warehouse. As soon as the basket has disappeared, the storekeeper puts in its place another one, which he fills with apples from the stocks.

The meaning of this approach is that we assess the need to do something based on the real needs of the buyer. In other words, if buyers do not take apples, it makes no sense to bring new baskets from the warehouse, and to fill up the spare baskets in the warehouse. This is the principle of stretching. Moreover - it can significantly reduce the time during which there are no apples in the basket in the trading floor. After all, all you need to do is just take them from the previous cell.

Moving from apples in the supermarket to projects in the design studio


So, what can we get using a kanban board in a design studio?

To begin with, the kanban board is a visualization tool. And we visualize our kanban cells, which are physically absent. For example, we broke our business process for creating a website design into the following stages:

Stages of website design development in the Chipsa studio

We can say that the layout stage is a basket with apples in a supermarket. Drawing, prototyping, analysis and sale are intermediate kanban cells. Reserves in our case are potential projects that need to be processed at the stage of sale (in our "warehouse").

It is easy to guess that the ideal state of affairs in the studio is the uniform occupancy of all kanban cells with projects. As soon as the customer “pulled” the project from the layout stage (for us this is the final stage of the site design development) - there is a need to immediately transfer one of the projects that are being drawn to the layout stage to fill in an empty cell. Next, fill in the empty cell of the rendering stage with one of the projects, having finished making prototypes, etc.

Kanban board working principle

So here. It is for the desire to maintain this ideal condition that we need a kanban board. It very clearly shows at which of the stages it is necessary to accelerate on any project, and at which a “congestion” has formed. And yet - that it’s time to think about the fact that there is already almost nothing in the warehouse and it's time to deal with the processing of potential customers.

Our Kanban Board Implementation


So, now we understand why we need a kanban board. How do we make it?

We went the simplest way. They glued a large white vinyl film directly onto the wallpaper in the studio. Marker divided it into stages. Well, in fact, stickers with project names began to be glued to the film.

Over time, we came to the conclusion that on stickers, in addition to the name of the project, it makes sense to write the name of the designer who works on it. This allows you to quickly assess the busyness of each designer simply by glancing briefly at the kanban board.

Kanban board stickers

Well, of course, introduced a color gradation of stickers. Green - according to the project everything is ok. Yellow - it is likely that the project will be delayed at this stage. Red - the project was delayed at this stage, and we must try to do everything to transfer it to the next stage. The criterion for assessing "delay" in our case is the deadline of the project. In addition, we strive to transfer to the next stage those projects for which we can get money faster (each stage is paid separately, and the payment for the stage is divided into an advance and a balance).

We visualized, visualized but not visualized


As you already understood, we did not stop there. Remember the principle - try to visualize everything that is possible? So we thought and decided - why not show the financial flows of the projects on the kanban board? Thus, we will be able to clearly see how much money each project will bring when moving to the next stage.

For each sticker, we added a mini-sticker with the amounts that we will receive for this project if it is transferred to the next stage. To do this, on the sticker we write two amounts - an advance and a balance. And for each amount we indicate the month in which this amount can be received. Thus, we get a kind of financial planning tool with which we can estimate the approximate total revenue from all projects at the beginning of the month, correlate it with the planned revenue. And evaluate the effectiveness of our work at the end of the month.

Kanban board stickers with mini sum stickers

The next step suggests itself - color separation for mini-stickers. Yes Yes. Green sticker - payment must be on time. A red sticker - either the customer delays the payment, or it is necessary to push according to the project in order to have time to hand over everything before the end of the month, to the salary. As a rule, these are minor edits or improvements. And as you probably already guessed, the number of red mini-stickers often increases significantly by the end of the month :)

To summarize


So, what did the introduction of the kanban board at Chips give us?
Before implementation:After implementation:
There was no clear understanding of how much to sell. There were cases when they took too many projects and could not “chew” them. Or they started feverishly searching for orders when they suddenly realized that the projects were about to end.Visualization of projects using a kanban board and the principle of drawing out makes it easy to assess the need for processing a potential client, transferring a non-urgent project to the next stage, etc.
To assess the employment of designers have tried many tools, including google table. She was not very visual. Her conduct took a lot of time.To assess the designer’s employment for the next two months, it’s enough to look at the board, calculate the number of stickers with the name of the designer and understand how busy it is and when it will free.
There were moments when it was not clear at what stage of the business process we had a weak link, if I may say so.Now you can clearly see at what stage there is a problem. It remains to find it and decide.
I must admit that before the introduction of the kanban board, we did not engage in monthly financial planning. It so happened that we started leading it in parallel with the introduction of the kanban board.A simple but fairly effective financial planning tool. Yes, it allows you to look only 2-3 months ahead. But then it is very clear. And you can really influence the cash flow by making every effort to the “necessary” projects in time.

Kanban board in the Chipsa studio

I think it is worth noting some of the “parameters” of our small Krasnoyarsk studio. We have 5 designers, 1 project manager and 1 art director. We strive to ensure that one designer performs at least 2 projects simultaneously. We have been using the kanban board for the third month. Very happy with this tool! :)

I hope that everything that I described here will be useful to you. I will be glad if this article helps you in such a difficult task as project management! )

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