Certified Kanban Management Specialist

Who this is for

• You work inside a flow

  Development, operations, support or shared services. You feel the effect of excess work in progress every day and lose time for not telling a blocker apart from a wait.

• You answer for the flow

  Delivery manager, tech lead or coordinator of a board that crosses more than one area. You have to decide limits, policies and classes of service, and what to do when the limit is broken for a legitimate reason.

• You decide about the demand

  Portfolio, product or service level agreement. You need to know what to ask before accepting a date, and what separates a forecast based on history from an estimate based on optimism.

What you take with you

• A permanent verification code

  Anyone confirms your credential at pmcert.org/verify, without having to ask you for anything.

• Approval that does not expire

  A credential you earned does not lapse, asks for no annual renewal and charges no subscription.

• LinkedIn and a public profile

  Add it to your licenses and certifications section, or share the link to your profile.

• A certificate with your score by domain

  In PDF, showing how you performed in each area assessed.

What you need to know

Seven domains, drawn at random from a bank written for this exam. Read each one and see where you stand.

• Fundamentals and principles

  What the method is and what it is not: an evolutionary approach rather than a restructuring, a pull system as opposed to a push one, and why the work flow is managed rather than the people. Also the situations in which it is not the right instrument.

• Visualisation and system design

  The board as a representation of the real flow, not the wished-for one: stages, waiting queues kept apart from working stages, written criteria for moving between them and visible blockers. When the board has stopped describing the operation.

• Flow and work limits

  Why to limit work in progress, where to place the limit and what to do when it is reached. A bottleneck recognised by accumulation rather than by complaint, the cost of multitasking, and the item that ages before it turns into an emergency.

• Metrics and predictability

  Choosing the metric by the question to answer: cycle time, lead time, throughput and the relation between them. Reading bands that widen in a cumulative flow diagram, and forecasting from the historical distribution with the confidence level stated.

• Classes of service and prioritisation

  Different treatment for different demands: classifying by the cost-of-delay profile rather than by the pressure of whoever asks, reserving capacity per class, and recognising the erosion that overuse of the expedite class produces.

• Cadences and roles

  Each meeting by the decision it produces, not by the agenda inherited from another method. The daily meeting run by the flow rather than by the person, the service delivery review with data on the table, and the cadence the organisation does not need to hold.

• Adoption and evolutionary change

  How the method comes in: surfacing dissatisfaction and the nature of demand before designing the system, starting from what the organisation already does, choosing the next step by the observed bottleneck, and recognising resistance produced by the rollout itself.