Kanban Practitioner: Flow, Metrics and Leadership

1 DayDates TBC

About This Course

Kanban Fundamentals establishes what Kanban is and why it works. This Practitioner course addresses the harder question: how do you use it well?

A day focused on the practitioner-level chapters of the AgileKM Handbook - actively managing work in progress, interpreting flow metrics without distortion, reading Cumulative Flow Diagrams, running hypothesis-driven improvements, and understanding the leadership and governance behaviours that support or undermine a Kanban system.

This is not a certification course. It is a thinking course. You will leave with clearer tools for diagnosing a struggling system, using data without being misled by it, and leading improvement that actually sticks.

What You'll Learn

✓Actively manage work in progress by identifying and responding to blocked items, aging work, and emerging delivery risks while work is still in the system

✓Interpret flow metrics - including cycle time distributions, throughput patterns, and work item age - in terms of system behaviour and variability rather than individual performance

✓Read and analyse a Cumulative Flow Diagram to identify bottlenecks, flow stability, and systemic patterns over time

✓Design and evaluate hypothesis-driven improvements to workflow policies, using flow metrics to assess whether a change has had the intended effect

✓Describe how effective leadership in a Kanban context shifts from task direction to policy stewardship and flow governance

✓Recognise and respond to systemic failure modes, including metric gaming, local optimisation, excessive expediting, and neglected governance

Why This Course

Goes beyond the board - addresses the thinking, governance, and leadership that most Kanban training skips

Real diagnostic tools - you will know how to read a system that is struggling and what to do about it

Evidence-led improvement - hypothesis-driven change rather than copying what worked elsewhere

Delivered personally by Alun - small group, full attention, genuine discussion

Who Is This For

People who have completed Kanban Fundamentals or who already have a working understanding of Kanban principles and want to develop more confident, analytical practice. Suitable for team leads, delivery managers, agile coaches, operations leaders, and anyone responsible for improving how a team or organisation manages its work. Particularly relevant for those who have introduced Kanban but are not sure it is working as well as it should.

Prerequisites

Completion of Kanban Fundamentals: Managing Your Workflow, or equivalent working knowledge of Kanban principles including WIP limits, the three Kanban practices, and core flow metrics

Want to run this course privately for your team?

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