That is a great example of the problem. This is also why I keep trying to get people in my office away from specific practices and big-M Methodologies and focused more on the principles at play.
Why does Kanban help in some offices and do nothing or hurt in others?
Two reasons for success: Luck or understanding. Two reasons for failure: lack of understanding or lack of commitment.
What does Kanban assist with, what principles?
It assists in elaborating and clarifying the workflow or processes in the organization or unit. This can be done many ways, Kanban is just one. But without understanding the, often unwritten, processes you cannot effect meaningful change (at best you're stabbing in the dark).
It also emphasizes focus by setting limits on "work in progress" which improves overall flow/throughput. It turns out that this is, generally, a good idea.
The ones who succeed don't succeed because of Kanban. They succeed because of those two basic principles (and other related principles and concepts that I'm not elaborating on here). Kanban was a mechanism which led to success by drawing on these ideas.
The ones who fail don't fail because of Kanban. They fail because they don't control WIP, or failed to describe their process accurately, so it provided no, or perhaps even negative, value. Why don't they control WIP? Maybe they aren't aware of that element of Kanban, or they don't believe that it can bring value and ignore it. They're too busy fighting fires so they don't have time to focus. Why don't they have an accurate process description? Often, because the process is dictated rather than discovered (You are doing X, even though you actually do A, B, and C).
That's just one practice and two principles that it is related to (there are others). This is the problem with Big-M Methodologies like Big-S Scrum and Big-W Waterfall and Big-A Agile, the easy part is the visible practices. So they're imitated. The hard part is the invisible principles and hidden practices (all the work that went into identifying the workflow, for instance). Repeat this across all the practices in these methodologies and you'll end up with a mess that succeeds by luck, or at least doesn't harm you so badly that you fail, but certainly doesn't offer significant assistance.