Introducing the principles of Kanban via Kanban Pizza Game
Round 1. Teams are introduced to the process of producing ingredients and baking pizzas. After the round is over they will evaluate on the process and discuss how to improve. Result is measured on inventory (bad), finished pizzas (good) and cycle time.
Round 2. Introduce orders by letting the facilitator hand out notes designed as "Kanban Cards" with order id, a field for starting/end time and pizza orders. The time keepers are encouraged to use the fields on the Kanban card for easy monitoring. Result is, again, measured and discussed.
Round 3. By now the teams are aware of what it takes to receive orders and bake pizzas. They have all set up some kind of implicit process with a value stream similar to Incoming -> Planned -> Preparing -> Cooking -> Done. We exploit this fact and hand out a readymade Kanban boards with default WIP-limits and policies for starters. All teams must use their new Kanban board to track status in the third round. An interesting observation from round 3 is that the team members will start having a greater understanding of the pipeline and status of each order and discussions will now be fact based and a lot of "pointing at the Kanban board" is involved. Result is, again, measured and discussed.
Round 4. In the fourth and final round each team is asked to evaluate on the given Kanban board and its WIP-limits and policies. Do they need more stages? Perhaps some will want to divide the Preparing stage into several stages to indicate the demand for ingredients. This is where the actual learning point of the game is. Hopefully each team will treasure the opportunity to change their boards to suit their exact flow. Execute the round and measure the outcome.
After the game each team member will have had practical experience with the following:
Kanban Boards
Kanban Cards
Various measurements
Push/pull mechanism
Retrospectives
I have found this to be a valuable foundation to continue onto more theoretical material and continuously refer to the Kanban Pizza Game they ran earlier.
In a later episode I will reveal which measurements we use and how the teams adopt them.
You can find much more about Kanban Pizza Game at agile 42's webpage.
