Managing Bottlenecks with Kanban

1. Managing Bottlenecks
with Kanban
Sanchita Mukhopadhyay
Kanban Day
31-Aug-2019

2. Types of Bottlenecks
• Non-instant availability (NIA)
• Product Owner availability
• Dependency on 3rd
party
• Management Approval
• Legacy Business process
• Capacity constrained resources (CCR)
• Small staff for testing and deployment
• Lack of operational maturity
• Inconsistent environments
• Technical debts

3. Five focusing steps to increase throughput
• Identify the system’s constraint(s)
• Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint(s)
• Subordinate everything else to the above decision(s)
• Elevate the system’s constraint(s)
• Start all over !

4. Exploit the Bottleneck
• Exploiting means that we are ensuring that the bottleneck isn’t distracted by non-
throughput producing work.
• Ensure that the bottleneck always works on the highest priority, highest value
work that contributes to the goal.
• Make sure the bottleneck works on only one thing at a time. We want to get to
done, stop starting and start finishing.
• Remove any non-throughput producing work from the bottleneck.
• Shield the bottleneck from the interruption and quickly remove impediments but
don’t shield them from important information like customer input and feedback.
• Make sure that the bottleneck is never idle or waiting for information, equipment
or material.

5. Subordinate decisions to the Bottleneck
• Subordinating decisions means the rest of the system works to help the
bottleneck produce maximum value.
• People other than the bottleneck have some slack. If everyone is working
toward the same goal, anyone working beyond the pace of the bottleneck is
not increasing the throughput of the system.
• Some approaches you can use are:
• Ensure that the work, information and materials received by the bottleneck as an input
to their work is of highest quality.
• Have everyone work to the pace of the bottleneck (no faster or slower)
• Someone else may be able to take some non-specialized tasks from the bottleneck. At
this stage, only have someone take on tasks if it doesn’t require a large investment in
time or money.

6. Elevate the Bottleneck
• Elevating the bottleneck requires time and money, so it’s done only
after exploiting and subordinating.
• You can elevate the bottleneck and improve performance by:
• Getting more people that can do the same work as the bottleneck
• Buy more or faster machines
• Give people training and better tools
• Coach for individual improvement
• Improve the workspace
• Change organizational policies

7. Manage Bottleneck with WIP Limits and
Commitment Point
• Consider the impact of the bottleneck’s position in the workflow
• Apply WIP limits to smooth outflow relieving the bottleneck
• If WIP limits are quite liberal in bottleneck and there is a lot of context
switching, consider lowering the WIP limit.
• If it doesn’t have a WIP limit, consider setting one.
• Consider the commitment point
This will minimize the negative impact of a bottleneck
and
Manipulate bottlenecks to improve flow

8. Bottleneck should always be downstream of the commitment point
Ideas Ready
(2)
Analysis
(3)
Development
(3)
Testing
(3)
Ongoing Done Ongoing Done Verification Acceptance
Commitment
point
Bottleneck should be here
Everything upstream of the commitment point is optional and easily discarded
Everything downstream of the commitment point is committed and not easily
abandoned

9. Bottleneck should always be downstream of the commitment point
Ideas Ready
(2)
Analysis
(3)
Development
(3)
Testing
(3)
Ongoing Done Ongoing Done Verification Acceptance
Commitment
point
Bottleneck should be here
Bottleneck workers should never be asked to work on something that
is optional and may be discarded.
Pull
Discarded