There is no Kanban process

Interesting excerpt from a recent post from David Anderson on the Kanbandev Yahoo! group

This is not a prescription. There is no “kanban process” as such. The process is whatever the team or organization is currently using. The technique is to map that process, put WIP limits on it and start a pull system. Everything else evolves from there.

You need to get away from agile process as prescription and start to recognize that every situation and every project is different and that process must be described as sets of policies and those policies should be chosen, or  modified to fit the risk profile and specific circumstances of the organization and its value chain.

The whole point of kanban is to enable people to find their own optimizations and change their own process, not to impose a new way of working upon them and ask them to change their behaviour. Kanban enables a situationally specific process to evolve rather than the imposition of an unsuitable prescription that was developed for someone else, in some other value stream, in some other organization, on a project with a different set of resources, budget, schedule and risk profile.

I want to prevent Kanban (in software engineering) becoming a dogmatic superstitious practice level process. What is different about Kanban is it does not specify engineering, workflow or project management practices. These are left to emerge in a situational/context specific fashion. In this respect it is completely different from any other agile approach previously published.

Kanban is about the notion that “your situation is truly different” and “we will not impose a process upon you”.