Chapter 4. Days 10-11 – Setting the Limits

You should, by now, have a pretty good understanding of your process and a Kanban board that supports it. We will now spend two days on deciding the limits to start with. Setting effective limits is integral to Kanban; it is often ignored, but to do so threatens the results that you are hoping Kanban will allow you to achieve.

Kanban is about limiting the work to make sure task switching is kept to a minimum and to stop buffers from being built up inside your system. Buffers make work grow old and become outdated. Value is lost in those internal queues while the frustration from the stakeholders increases.

The best way to acknowledge the importance of setting limits is through a simple game. All you need are matches or sticks, dice, and five people to play. You can do this with three to six people, but in this example, we will use five. If you have more than six people, you can have multiple setups of three to six people. You are then able to aggregate...