KSD case studies
KSD · Put your knowledge to work in context.
Kanban System Design (KSD) is a two-day, hands-on course offered in person, or 16 hours online, that sits at the start of the Kanban Management Professional path. It is built for people who design or manage a work system, who need improvement to become visible, or who are starting a Kanban practice and want a practical shared foundation. Rather than copying someone else's board, KSD teaches you to design a Kanban system around the work, services, and people in front of you. The material is organised around six areas: understanding service and purpose (demand patterns, sources of dissatisfaction); designing workflow (policies, capacity, classes of service); improving through feedback loops, flow signals, and the next experiment; seeing the whole system; designing with STATIK, the Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban; and making flow visible while using pull with intention. The KSD case studies are 5 cases and about 3,272 words.
1The invisible internal platform team
An internal analytics platform team of 12 engineers supports 38 product teams. Its three-year-old charter says 'provide data infrastructure and dashboards.' Work arrives through Slack, a service desk, and direct requests to engineers.
660 words, about 3 min2Rush requests in regulatory submissions
A 19-person regulatory submissions group processes marketing materials for a medical device company. Requests arrive from six regional marketing teams: about 95 per month, with peaks to 140 before trade shows.
651 words, about 3 min3Bimodal cycle time in site reliability engineering
A nine-person site reliability engineering team handles changes to a payments platform. Work is tracked in a Jira board with columns Backlog, In Progress, Code Review, Test, and Deploy.
632 words, about 3 min4Three teams, one value stream, one growing queue
A company sells an online subscription product. Three teams-Discovery, Build, and Release-work in sequence.
659 words, about 3 min5Designing a pull-based onboarding flow with STATIK
A 14-person customer onboarding team at a business bank handles new merchant accounts. Requests come from sales, partners, and compliance.
670 words, about 3 min