Why is it called Kanban?

From David Anderson

Those who’ve read the “From worst to best…” paper will know that I coached Dragos on the Microsoft XIT solution using the Drum-Buffer-Rope application from Theory of Constraints. DBR and Kanban are close cousins. They both implement pull solutions. So why call it Kanban?

I came to realize later that a Kanban solution for XIT would have looked identical to the DBR solution. I was also persuaded by Don Reinertsen that Kanban implementations perform better when restarting from an outage in the bottleneck. I also found Kanban easier to explain because it implements WIP limits at local stages in the value-stream and does so across the whole value stream – no need to explain the Rope component of DBR and no need to explain why you don’t limit WIP downstream from the bottleneck.

In addition Lean is easier to explain than the metaphor behind Drum-Buffer-Rope.

And as a bonus there was an existing Lean community and body of knowledge to lean on and pull from A body of knowledge that had greater acceptance amongst a wider audience than the Theory of Constraints.

So that’s it from my end. A WIP limited pull system where the WIP limits are imposed across the whole value stream is a (virtual) Kanban system. Virtual or not depends on how the signaling is done.

In my early presentations I actually referred to the applications I’d been involved in as Virtual Kanban but the Virtual was soon dropped as the idea spread.

Meanwhile, Mary Poppendieck had referred to a card wall as a kanban board in her first book. While this was technically not correct as the board didn’t refer to a pull system nor was there a WIP limit, the term Kanban Board had sneaked into the vocabulary of Agile and Software Development. Hence, the term was already in usage .

By the time Kanban got traction with the Agile community with Aaron, Karl and Joe particularly picking it up after Agile 2007, I had already reported the Corbis application which included a card wall.

Hence, the two ideas of Kanban had come together.

So with that background why call this new approach Kanban?

For me the evolution is based on the principles behind a signal card based pull system. Kanban in manufacturing is the inspiration behind what I now call Kanban (for software engineering.) Hence, I think the choice of name is reasonable in its derivation and as a bonus it works well as brand for the approach. This is borne out by the 500+ members of the Kanbandev Yahoo! group and the number of people adopting the approach, experimenting with it and publishing their results.

If we didn’t call it Kanban what better term would there be? [rhetorical, as I think the horse left the stable on this a while ago, and any attempt to change it is unlikely to stick]