Our team has been using a kanban system for several months now. We switched from a modified scrum. One of my colleagues, David C, is a dedicated professional who finds project management fascinating. Please, do not hold that against him.

David C is the prime mover of the ideas of another David, David J. Anderson, to our team, e.g. kanban. The more I read on Anderson's blog, the more I see that most development process improvements might be, insidiously, directed at management. This conclusion might seem obvious to the more cynical reader. 

I might be boiling down this post to the point of losing its essence, but here goes.

There are things that a worker can control and stuff you (a worker) cannot. The stuff you can control (the process our kanban maps) are worth trying to improve using work focused techniques such as the Five Focusing Steps. This is all common sense stuff to an actual worker.

The other, less obvious point to me is that the stuff you can't control largely falls in the bucket of policy. This is the Office Space stuff like TPS reports (American cinema reference). If you have a policy the prevents anyone from using a new build system, then you should not bring a technique such as the Five Focusing Steps to bear on it even when it creates a bottleneck. In fact, there is nothing you, the worker, can do on the assembly line to fix that.

It would be like a guy at Toyota saying that they need to stop using Toyota robots and start using Ford robots or something like that. Or it would be like trying to get US manufacturers to use the metric system. It's not a process, you-can-control action; it's a policy, you-can't-control decision.