Follow these five steps to improve your system of work 

1) Understand the end-to-end system of the value flow to the customer

• • Study how the flow of work and visualise your work and map the flow
  • Run the map, watch work items flow through the map
  • Limit the number of tokens

2) Understand the system capabilities

• • Types of work
  • System lead time for fulfilling each type of work
  • Arrival rate for each type of work
  • Departure rate for each type of work
  • Failure demand for each type of work, demand caused by failure to do something or to do something right for the customer – John Seddon

3) Understand your system variability

• • For each type of work, measure
  • Common cause variation, act on the system to change the common cause variation
  • Assignable cause variation, act on the cause to remove assignable cause variation

4) Measure the flow efficiency for each type of work

• • Measure the flow of each major knowledge discovery step

5 Purposeful change

• • understand the root causes of the failure demand and tackle them
  • Use the arrival, departure rate and flow efficiency to target your improvement efforts and achieve better results for your investment
  • Evolve your system of work and improve your system of work

Kanban Management Professionals are experts in visualizing and improving the system of work.