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Comment by sly010 | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: The way kanban is used in project management is different than the original kanban used in manufacturing plants. In "IRL" kanban cards are handed _backwards_ to the previous station to signal demand, so things don't get worked on, unless they are needed downstream.

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Lean kanban was never meant for project management, it is a process management and demand leveling technique.

Agile card boards like this bear little resemblance to Kanban, but the name caught on with the original Kanban software book. It is still a decent book though, and does in fact cover many of the principles of lean kanban. That said, I've rarely met a team using a kanban board that is familiar with the book or the principles of kanban.

https://www.amazon.ca/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary-Technol...

I would say a large number of people also understood it from The Phoenix Project.

The non-kanbanness of software project boards is the lack of limits or limits applied to the wrong resource. E.g. the number of items of in-progress or in-review should be limited to the number of developers who perform these actions. Setting a column limit irrespective of this doesn't make sense. Also shouldn't have N cards assigned to one person and none assigned to N-1 others. In short column/state != limited resource.

Yep, but it's logically the same. The Todo/Ready pile is the "demand" that is waiting to be fulfilled, and the worker "pulls" a new card from the ToDo/Ready pile, rather than "pull" a part to assemble a car. If anyone is using Kanban for tech work and hasn't read the wiki page, the concepts behind Kanban are far more important than the actual process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

The idea of Scrum Sprints applied to this has always seemed ridiculous to me. Scrum Sprints box the time for a given set of work ("We're going to get these 3 items done in a sprint") rather than just dynamically allocate work in a steady stream. In Kanban, you just take work and execute it as it appears for you, and it gets done when it gets done. They don't make one car a day, they make a dynamically shifting amount of cars per day, as needed. (Incidentally, I just found this adorable Toyota Production Children's Questions page https://www.toyota.co.jp/en/kids/faq/b/01/)

Scrum sprints limit work in progress just like kanban. It's just that with kanban you can set more granular WIP limits. I wrote about this here: https://andreschweighofer.com/agile/kanban-as-an-evolution-o...

Suddenly things make sense... I would look at a pile of (virtual) cards in a spot and wonder why there was a pile of cards when a goal was not too have a pileup.

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