You’ve designed your Kanban system. Now the harder work begins. The Kanban System Improvement (KSI) course — the second accredited step in the Kanban Management Professional (KMP) pathway — takes you beyond board design and into the advanced practices that determine whether Kanban actually sticks in an organisation: scaling across multiple teams, understanding and removing the sources of lead time variability, working with the Kanban Maturity Model, and leading the cadences that keep a Kanban system improving over time.

Where KSD gave you the foundation, KSI gives you the leverage. Working through real case studies, you’ll learn how to read and respond to the signals your system is already generating — lead time distributions, blocked work, upstream demand, dependencies — and how to use Run Charts, Cumulative Flow Diagrams, and evolutionary change techniques to drive meaningful, evidence-based improvement that lasts rather than gut-feel changes that don’t.

This is a boutique, specialist training at £900 + VAT — led by an Accredited Kanban Trainer who runs the UK’s leading Kanban practitioner community, with a maximum class size of 12. Providers who treat Kanban as a line item in a generic IT catalogue don’t operate at this level. We do, because the Kanban Coaching Exchange is where our trainer works every week — and that’s what comes into the room with you.

KSD + KSI = The Kanban Management Professional (KMP) Designation

The Kanban Management Professional (KMP) designation is awarded by Kanban University to practitioners who complete both KSD and KSI through an authorised training provider. It is the most widely recognised credential for Kanban practitioners and is increasingly specified by organisations hiring for agile coaching, delivery leadership, and transformation roles.

Kanban University requires that both courses are completed through an official authorised provider. Agile Affinity is an authorised Kanban University training provider — so your KMP pathway is fully intact when you train with us. Practitioners who complete KSD or KSI through unaccredited providers are not eligible for the designation, regardless of what they were told at the time.

What Will You Receive?

	KU Certificate of Attendance & KMP Designation An official KSI Certificate of Attendance from Kanban University. Combined with your KSD certificate, gives you the Kanban Management Professional (KMP) designation — the gold standard Kanban credential from KU.
	Scaling, Cadences, and Flow Metrics Practice Hands-on practice scaling Kanban across upstream, downstream, and connected systems, running all seven Kanban cadences effectively, and applying key flow metrics — Lead Time, Run Charts, and Cumulative Flow Diagrams — to guide continuous improvement in your organisation.
	Electronic Course Materials A full digital copy of course slides, materials, and your Mural workshop outputs — everything created across both days, ready to reference and share with your team as you begin applying what you’ve learned.
	One Month of Kanban+ Access Every attendee receives a one-month full access trial to Kanban+ — including the latest Kanban books, tools, and artefacts from Kanban University, including advanced KMM and flow resources.

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Included: A Free 30-Minute Coaching Session After the Course

Every booking includes a free 30-minute one-on-one session with Helen, scheduled after the course. At KSI level you’re applying Kanban in complex, real organisational contexts — use this session to work through a specific scaling challenge, review your KMM assessment, or plan your next steps towards the KMP designation. This is the kind of post-course support that distinguishes training that changes your practice from training that just adds a line to your CV.

How Does the Kanban System Improvement Course Work?

Who Is This Course For?

KSI is for practitioners who have completed KSD and are ready to move from designing Kanban systems to actively improving them. The topics are more advanced, the case studies are more complex, and the conversations go deeper — this is the course where Kanban stops being something your team does and becomes something your organisation evolves with.

Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters — looking to deepen their Kanban practice beyond the basics and acquire the analytical tools to lead improvement initiatives with confidence.

Delivery Managers and Operations Leaders — who have introduced Kanban in their organisation and need to understand why certain problems persist — variability, dependencies, upstream demand — and what to do about them.

Transformation Leads — responsible for scaling Kanban across multiple teams or value streams and needing a structured, evidence-based approach to doing so without imposing a framework the organisation isn’t ready for.

KSD graduates working towards KMP — if you have completed KSD with us or elsewhere through an authorised KU provider and want to complete your KMP pathway, this is the natural and required next step.

Course Curriculum: From System Design to Organisational Improvement

The KSI syllabus follows the official Kanban University curriculum and builds directly on your KSD foundation. KSD taught you how to design a single Kanban system. KSI teaches you how to manage, scale, and continuously improve connected systems using data, cadences, and evolutionary change techniques.

Motivation and the Benefits of Evolutionary Change — Why the Kanban Method’s evolutionary approach to change is so effective, how to build and sustain motivation for improvement in your organisation, and how to address the most common forms of resistance without forcing change on people who didn’t ask for it.

Understanding Kanban Systems at Scale — A deeper look at how Kanban systems connect and interact: upstream systems, downstream systems, connected service delivery across multiple teams, and the Kanban roles (Service Request Manager, Service Delivery Manager) that make multi-system coordination work.

Scaling Out Kanban Across the Organisation — A case-study-driven exploration of how to extend Kanban beyond a single team in multiple directions — upstream into demand management, downstream into delivery, and across connected systems. How to maintain coherence and flow as your Kanban implementation grows in scope and complexity.

Running the Kanban Cadences — A practical guide to conducting all six Kanban cadences effectively: the Daily Kanban Meeting, the Replenishment Meeting, the Kanban Meeting, the Delivery Planning Meeting, the Service Delivery Review and the Operations Review. What each one is for, how to run it well, and how to use the feedback it generates to drive continuous improvement at every level of the organisation.

Understanding Lead Time and Sources of Delay — Where lead time actually comes from, how to decompose it, and how to identify and target the specific sources of delay in your system. Covers the relationship between WIP, flow, and lead time in depth — why lead time is often much longer than people believe and how to close that gap systematically.

Variability, Dependencies, and Bottleneck Management — The different sources of variability in knowledge work systems, how to identify them, and what targeted techniques can reduce or accommodate them. How to find and remove bottlenecks using data rather than instinct — including how to manage dependencies between teams and systems without creating coordination overhead that cancels out the benefit.

Flow Metrics for Continuous Improvement — How to use Lead Time charts, Run Charts, and Cumulative Flow Diagrams (CFDs) as practical improvement tools — not just vanity dashboards. Reading the signals your system is already generating, interpreting what they mean, and using that data to make better decisions about what to change next and how to validate that the change worked.

Your Trainer: Helen Meek

Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) · Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) · Accredited Kanban Consultant (AKC) · ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) · Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) · Certified Team Coach (CTC)  Helen has 18+ years of organisational change and agile coaching experience, with 13+ years specifically applying the Kanban Method across 60+ organisations including ASOS, Merck, and Cambridge University Press. The topics in KSI — KMM, scaling, flow analytics — are not things she teaches from a book: they are the tools she uses with clients every week as an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) and Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP). Helen runs the Kanban Coaching Exchange, one of the UK’s most active Kanban practitioner communities, and she brings those live practitioner conversations directly into the training room. At KSI level, the questions get harder and the answers get more nuanced — this is the course where the value of having a trainer who has genuinely done this in organisations, rather than just taught it, becomes most apparent.

Benefits of Training with Agile Affinity

Complete Your KMP Pathway KSD + KSI through an authorised KU provider = Kanban Management Professional (KMP). We are authorised. Your pathway is protected.

Save on Future Courses Receive 20% off all future Agile Affinity certifications when you sign up for our newsletter.

Join the Kanban Community Join the Kanban Coaching Exchange and the wider Agile Affinity community — the ongoing peer support that makes the difference between a qualification and a practice.

Free 1:1 Coaching Session Every booking includes a free 30-minute session with Helen to help you apply what you’ve learned and plan your next improvement step.

Agile Affinity is a UK-based boutique agile coaching and training consultancy, established in 2019. We certify over 750 practitioners per year and run some of the UK’s most active agile communities — including Scrum Event (the largest Scrum Alliance meetup in Europe), the Kanban Coaching Exchange, the Agile Coaching Exchange, and Agile Coach Camp UK. When you train with us, you’re not just attending a course — you’re joining a community of practitioners who are actively using what you’re about to learn.

Ready to Go All the Way to KMP? Ask About Our KSD + KSI Bundle Price.

If you’re planning to complete both courses and earn your Kanban Management Professional (KMP) designation, we offer a special bundle price for booking KSD and KSI together. It’s the most cost-effective route to KMP — and the most focused, since both courses are delivered by the same trainer in the same learning environment.

Email us with the dates you’re interested in and we’ll send you the bundle pricing and get you booked in.

Email talk@agileaffinity.com to ask about the KSD + KSI bundle →

Frequently Asked Questions

Kanban University®, Kanban System Design (KSD), Kanban System Improvement (KSI), and Kanban Management Professional (KMP) are trademarks of Lean Kanban Inc. Any unauthorised use is strictly prohibited. Agile Affinity LLP is an authorised Kanban University training provider.