I recently had the privilege to speak that the Calgary .NET User Group’s new lunchtime series.  This series is an opportunity for people to come and hear about exciting new topics with a minimal time commitment. And in this case, CNUG President Dave Paquette felt is was about time that we have a talk about Kanban.

Here is a link to the video of my 50+ minute presentation. It’s the first time they’ve video taped one of these, so please don’t be to critical of the quality. 😀

You can find the slides on Slideshare here.

The one thing I’d like to pull out specifically from this presentation was the exercise we went through (11:24 in the video) in understanding what it was we were actually talking about. In my slide deck, I indicated there are three common definitions of kanban out there and that we really needed to understand which one we were talking about in any conversation around the topic. And in an informal little survey of what participants though kanban was, we got the all three definitions from different people in the audience. The three commonly confused definitions are:

1. kanban – signboard, visual signal, card
2. kanban system – pull-based work(flow) management system, normally at the heart of a kanban method implementation
3. Kanban method – An approach to incremental, evolutionary process change for organizations

Very often when I am discussing the Kanban Method with people who are new to any of these ideas, they are often getting them confused and it is really important that we clarify which we are talking about.

Do you know what Kanban you’re talking about? 😀