If you don’t have time for kanban training, you need kanban training

One of the most useful metrics for managing work is flow efficiency. Flow efficiency is the percentage of time from when you first start to work on an item until you completely finish that item and deliver the results that you actually work on the item.

For example, suppose it takes you 100 hours to deliver work and you spend every single second during those 100 hours doing the necessary work. Your flow efficiency would be 100%. That high rate is almost impossible to achieve, especially when the work requires more than one person.

In another case, suppose you worked for 10 hours and it took 100 hours to deliver. Your flow efficiency would be 10%. This is a common situation that everyone should recognize. How many times have you done a project that took six months to complete, but you really did only a few weeks of work during that time? Or a customer made a request that only required one hour to fulfill, but two weeks to deliver?

It turns out that common flow efficiency for teams that do not use a method like kanban is in the range of 5% to 15%. I think you would have to agree that that sounds terrible. If you think about your own work, you can probably identify multiple reasons for your low flow efficiency. Kanban is all about clarifying those reasons and providing methods for handling them. This is the core of what you learn in kanban training.

Kanban is not a miracle potion and will not bring your flow efficiency from 5% to 100%. But organizations do experience increases to the range of 40%. So, there is still room for improvement, but kanban is helping make an improvement of 300% to 800%!

What does that improvement mean in your day to day work? First of all, it means huge reductions in the time it takes to deliver work. Imagine what your customer would think if work that used to take two weeks to deliver now takes only one hour.

Now, think about all the pressure coming from customers and managers to estimate when work will be finished and to deliver at the planned time. You will reduce that pressure tremendously and delight all your stakeholders. Their trust in your work will increase proportionately and you will increasingly experience the pleasure of work well done, instead of the pain of being under constant pressure to deliver. Kanban also means that your team will increasingly have time available to make improvements and to handle those internal changes that you are constantly required to put off.