The official Kanban Method guide: what it defines and how to use it
Quick summary: Kanban's reference documents
The Kanban Method is defined by reference documents — most prominently The Official Kanban Guide maintained by Kanban University, and the community Kanban Guide (kanbanguides.org).
They formalize the change management and service delivery principles, the six general practices, the pull system with WIP limits, flow metrics and the cadences of feedback.
Like the Scrum Guide for Scrum, these documents are the test of whether a practice belongs to the method or is a local adaptation.
Before diving into reading:
Kanban grew from practice, and its guides consolidate that experience into a formal reference. This article tours what they define and how to use them without turning the method into bureaucracy.
For a didactic walkthrough of the same content, see the complete Kanban Method guide.
1) The reference documents
Two documents anchor the method. The Official Kanban Guide, from Kanban University, condenses David J. Anderson's work and community experience into the canonical description of principles and practices. The Kanban Guide (2020, kanbanguides.org) offers a compact, tool-agnostic definition centered on flow.
Both are free and short. They differ in emphasis, but agree on the essentials: visualize, limit WIP, manage flow, make policies explicit, install feedback loops, improve evolutionarily.
2) Change management principles
The guides formalize how Kanban approaches change: start with what you do now, respecting current roles and responsibilities; agree to pursue improvement through evolutionary change; and encourage acts of leadership at every level.
These principles are the method's safety mechanism — adoption without reorganization, change without shock — and they are why Kanban can wrap around any existing process, including Scrum.
3) Service delivery principles
The second principle set orients the method toward customers: understand and focus on their needs and expectations; manage the work, not the workers; and regularly review the network of services.
The framing of teams as services delivering value is what elevates the board from task tracker to management instrument: a service has customers, requests, a flow and measurable delivery.
4) The pull system and WIP limits
The guides define Kanban systems as pull systems: work enters a stage only when capacity exists, signaled by WIP limits. Limiting work in progress is a defining practice — a board without limits is a visualization, not yet a Kanban system.
Commitment points and delivery points frame the measured flow: where the system promises to do the work, and where the work reaches the customer. Between them, WIP limits keep the system inside its capacity. Practical application is covered in the WIP limits article.
5) Metrics and flow management
Four metrics are canonical: WIP (how much is in the system), cycle time (how long an item takes from start to finish), throughput (items finished per unit of time) and work item age (how long current items have been in progress).
The guides prescribe managing flow with these numbers — watching aging items, smoothing arrival, attacking blockers — and using distributions rather than averages for forecasting: "85% of items finish within eight days" says more than any mean.
6) Cadences and evolutionary improvement
The method installs regular feedback loops: team-level cadences like the daily Kanban meeting and replenishment meeting, and service-level cadences like the service delivery review, operations review and strategy review.
Improvement is evolutionary by definition: observe the flow, hypothesize, change a policy or a limit, measure the effect, keep or revert. There is no end state — the guides describe a system designed to keep changing safely.
7) Using the guides in practice
Use them the way you would use the Scrum Guide: as a boundary test and a drift detector. If your "Kanban" has no WIP limits, no explicit policies and no metrics, the guides tell you what to add next. If a consultant sells you a rigid Kanban process with mandatory roles, the guides tell you that rigidity is not the method.
Then practice: a real board, real limits and two honest cadences teach more than any document. A local-first tool like KanbanApp is enough to implement everything the guides require of a starting team.
8) Conclusion
The Kanban guides formalize a method that is easy to caricature as "a board with columns": principles for safe change, service orientation, pull with WIP limits, flow metrics and standing feedback loops.
Read them once, then let your board and your data do the daily teaching — evolutionary improvement included.