James: I’ve used Kanban in my business, especially when we had the SEO business and 65 people in our team at one point. It was a very simple but effective system. I think I borrowed it from Toyota, it’s where I first heard about it. I would say a good chunk of people listening to this don’t actually know what Kanban even means. Do you want to explain it in simple terms?
Lloyd: Yeah. So Kanban is about having a number of labeled-out steps of how a task is going to get from beginning of where it was created until the end when it’s finished, and is done. And so a classic one might be steps for a new customer workflow. So they might be request for consultation, then we might do a follow-up. So this task is going into those different steps.
Creating a proposal, that’s the next step. Reviewing that proposal, sending the proposal, creating the contract, and then it might be win, lost or followed up. So all of those would be stepped into Kanban. And that should be predictable. And that should be something that we would know how long we typically expect for a task to flow between those individual steps. So that’s very predictable. And then we as a company, at VirtualDOO, we’ll be looking at that Kanban and then try to identify the slowest piece and speed that up to make sure that things are constantly improving.
James: Right, you get high visibility on where things get stuck. And I remember in our business, we had to do, doing and done. So I could, at a glance, look at and see which column is it in. I know the stuff we haven’t even started, I know the things that are working in progress. And I know the things that are finished.
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