Kanban is a method for managing the creation of products with an emphasis on continual delivery while not overburdening the development team. Like scrum, Kanban is a process designed to help teams work together more effectively.
Kanban is based on 3 basic principles:
Visualize what you do today (workflow): seeing all the items in context of each other can be very informative
Limit the amount of work in progress (WIP): this helps balance the flow-based approach so teams dont start and commit to too much work at once
Enhance flow: when something is finished, the next highest thing from the backlog is pulled into play
Kanban promotes continuous collaboration and encourages active, ongoing learning and improving by defining the best possible team workflow.
Benefits of Kanban:
Kanban and Scrum at their core are summarized by the premise: Stop Starting, Start Finishing. The entire teams focus is on getting to done for the tasks in progress.
Benefits:
Shorter cycle times can deliver features faster.
Responsiveness to Change:
When priorities change very frequently, Kanban is ideal.
Balancing demand against throughput guarantees that most the customer-centric features are always being worked.
Requires fewer organization / room set-up changes to get started
Reducing waste and removing activities that dont add value to the team/department/organization
Rapid feedback loops improve the chances of more motivated, empowered and higher-performing team members
Kanban and VersionOne:
VersionOne supports multiple teams using multiple agile methodologies. Teams use VersionOne to track the status of their items, setting WIP limits for each process stage to help them identify, manage, and mitigate constraints with the goal of optimizing the teams flow.
Teams interested in Kanban benefit from VersionOnes customizable Kanban board and collaboration capabilities.
If your Kanban teams are:
distributed
using multiple development methodologies across the entire larger team (Scrum, XP, DSDM)
seeking to automate tracking your projects
gaining insight from roll-up reporting via multiple teams and projects
searching to improve delivery performance.
have a look at VersionOne.