KSD study guide
KSD · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
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. The KSD study guide has 6 sections and about 2,342 words.
01Understand Service & Purpose
This domain tests whether you can say what a Kanban system is for: which service it provides, to whom, and how purpose drives every later design choice. Kanban treats an organisation as a network of services.
367 words, about 2 min02Design Workflow (policies & capacity, classes of service)
This domain tests whether you can turn a workflow into an explicit, capacity-aware, policy-driven system: columns that describe states of work, WIP limits grounded in real capability, and classes of service that decide what gets pulled next. Columns are states of work, not people or job titles.
390 words, about 2 min03Improve (feedback loops, flow signals, next experiment)
This domain tests whether you can run improvement as a disciplined loop: cadences that surface problems, flow signals that quantify them, and one explicit experiment at a time. Name each cadence, its purpose and who attends: daily Kanban meeting (walk the board right to left, on flow, blockers and ageing work - not status reporting); replenishment (choose what enters the system, per class of service); service delivery review (flow metrics against customer expectations); risk review (deadlines, dependencies, delivery risk); operations review (whole-system, across services); strategy review (purpose, portfolio, classes of service); delivery planning (commitments to customers).
395 words, about 2 min04See the whole system
This domain tests whether you can map the entire value stream end to end - upstream demand and downstream delivery included - and reason about the system rather than optimise a part of it. Performance is a property of the whole.
385 words, about 2 min05Design with STATIK
STATIK - the Systems Thinking Approach To Introducing Kanban - is the design method used in KSD to build a Kanban system that fits an existing workflow, rather than a template. The order is the point.
391 words, about 2 min06Make flow visible and use pull with intention
This domain tests board design and the discipline of pull: work moves because a policy says so, not because someone pushes harder or shouts louder. Cards carry work item type, class of service, the date they entered the state (age), a blocker flag and, where useful, the person working on it.
414 words, about 2 min