David Anderson

Will Role-based Training Be Introduced Into Kanban?

January 7, 2016 by David Anderson

With the acknowledgement that two clear roles are emerging in Kanban implementations, the Service Delivery Manager, and the Service Request Manager, does this signal that Lean Kanban University will be reorganizing to offer role-based training? It’s a fair question, and the answer is “No.” This article explains why…

This diagram shows the current Lean Kanban University Alternative Path to Agility currciulum roadmap. It shows the currently offered professional credential of KMP (Kanban Management Professional). KMP is offered to people who complete the KMP I & II classes, a total of 4 days of training. On completion of KMP I & II they know how to analyze and design a kanban system using the STATIK method, and they know how to implement the Kanban Cadences, identify opportunities for improvements, with many ideas on what to change and how it will affect capability. Hence, a KMP knows how to operate the Kanban Method for evolutionary change within their organization.

A KMP could play the role of Service Delivery Manager, Service Request Manager or Kanban Coach (though not at the level of expertise of Kanban Coaching Professional). The difference between a KCP and a KMP is that KCPs are trained in identifying resistance to change, devising strategies to avoid resistance and in counter-measures to overcome resistance and motivate people to get on-board with Kanban adoption. KMPs do not have this training. KMPs are qualified to operate a Kanban Method implementation, KCPs are qualified to introduce the Kanban Method successfully.

We do not feel the need to introduce role-based training because as much as 60-70% of the training for SDMs would overlap with SRMs. We also feel there is lots of value in KMP training for people who will not play the SDM or SRM roles. We hear reports from the field that there is a 60-70% overlap in the training for Scrum scrummasters and product owners taking the CSM and CSPO training. We feel that having role-based training with such a significant overlap in curriculum is inefficient and confusing, so Lean Kanban University will offer the one set of training and the single professional credential of KMP regardless of the role the individual is playing.

Proto-Replenishment Semi-Push System

January 7, 2016 by David Anderson

There is a class of replenishment meeting which I believe we need to call out and name separately. In these replenishment meetings the backlog is already committed and often already prioritized. I am proposing we label these proto-replenishment meetings. This post explains why and asks whether the name proto-replenishment is appropriate or not…

Emerging Roles in Kanban – SDM and SRM

January 6, 2016 by David Anderson

Kanban has always been the “start with what you do now” method, and no one gets a “new role, responsibilities, or job titles” at least not initially. However, it is now clear that some roles are emerging in the field with some implementations. So, it is valuable to report this, while they remain suggestions, options, or ideas, rather than prescribed roles for a Kanban implementation. This post follows my previous one that Kanban doesn’t share Agile’s cross-functional team reogranization agenda, and has always been a cross team, cross function solution for service delivery workflows. What follows is in the context of a service delivery workflow which spans functions or teams and is (most likely) orthogonal to the organizational structure of the enterprise, business or product unit.

Service Delivery Manager

From the early days of Kanban, we talked about the need for a manager to take on responsibility for flow of work. Perhaps, echoing the concept of scrummaster, in some implementations the role of person responsible for flow has been nicknamed flow manager or sometimes “flowmaster”. It’s a sticky, if arcane and tribal, title. For our official literature, I wanted something more corporate friendly, and something that is more outwardly facing. “Flow manager” is inwardly facing and focused on process problems. I prefer names that are outwardly focused and address customer needs. This is in line with the Kanban value of “Customer Focus.”

There is precedent for renaming concepts in Kanban to give them more customer focus. Inspired by the Improvement Kata in Toyota Kata, we defined and named, the System Capability Review meeting in 2012. This was later renamed to Service Delivery Review (SDR). The name change was to give the meeting an outward focus on customer needs, rather than an inward focus on process performance. By keeping the naming, the language, and the values, externally focused, we insure that the right metrics are used to drive relevant, valuable improvements. An outward focus is vital to insure “fitness for purpose” and to deliver on the Kanban agenda of survivability.

So, the “flow manager” concept is called the Service Delivery Manager. It is primarily intended to be a role played by an existing member of staff and not a new job title or position. So, by creating Service Delivery Manager, we do weaken the message that no one gets new responsibilities – actually someone does, the someone who takes on the SDM role.

The SDM role existed in 2007 in our first full scale Kanban Method implementation. It was usually played by a project manager from the PMO. The SDM carried responsibility for the Replenishment Meeting, the Delivery Planning Meeting, escalating blocker tickets, and what we would now call Risk Review. Replenishment, Delivery Planning and Risk Review are 3 of the Kanban Cadences.

In more recent implementations the SDM also facilitates the daily Kanban Meeting. In 2007, this role was taken by one of the function managers in the workflow. The SDM role was usually played by someone from the PMO.

Service Request Manager

For some number of years, the question has existed, what do you do with middle-men in the workflow? As a general rule, we wish to remove non-value-adding middle-men positions from the workflow. However, we also wish to avoid resistance to change. These are two core tenets of Kanban coaching and general goals we might have for change management when deploying Kanban in an organization. And the following guidance has existed since 2009: we seek to elevate the role of the middle-man, above the workflow, out of the value stream. The most common example of this is shown in the diagram, “What do you do with the Product Owners?”

The goal is to reposition the role of product owner as a risk manager and facilitator: someone who owns the policies for the system which frame decisions together with facilitating the decision making mechanism. This role is of higher value, is transparent and open to scrutiny and relieves us of the risk of the “hero product owner” who magically understand where the best business value is to be found. This elevated risk management and policy owning position improves corporate governance, improves consistency of process, and reduces personnel risk associated with a single individual.

Nevertheless, an individual with a “hero product owner” self-image will resist such a change. Kanban Coaching Professionals are trained to manage this resistance as part of their training in the Kanban Coaching Masterclass.

When the product owner is successfully repositioned above the workflow as the owner of the policies for risk assessment, scheduling, sequencing and selection, they have successfully transitioned into the Service Request Manager (SRM) role.

Again, we are weakening the “no one gets new responsibilities” principle, but this transition is generally managed over a period of time and isn’t necessarily thrust upon individuals at the start of Kanban adoption.

When the SRM role exists, the SRM usually takes responsibility for the Replenishment Meeting and will play a role in the Strategy Review and Risk Review.

When Do We Need SDM & SRM Roles With Kanban?

January 6, 2016 by David Anderson

With the emergence of the SDM & SRM roles with Kanban, we need to ask the questions, when do we need these roles? When do we need both? And are they merely roles an existing member of staff takes on as new responsibilities, or might they be new positions for which we need to hire? This post provides guidance based on what we’ve seen in the field so far.

When do we need a Service Delivery Manager?

I genuinely believe you always need a service delivery manager. This role has existed since the first Kanban at Microsoft in 2005. In the early days the SDM role was always played by a project manager. So it isn’t a new position but a refinement of existing responsibilities for an existing member of the staff. The SDM is therefore a role played by someone external to the value stream or workflow.

In the upper diagram, a service delivery workflow is shown spanning a functionally silo’d organization. The SDM facilitates the Replenishment Meeting receiving customer requests and facilitating a collaborative decision making process to select, sequence and schedule work to flow through to delivery. The SDM will collaborate with the functional manager or team leads and play a reasonably active part in the day-to-day operation of the kanban system, definitely attending and perhaps facilitating the Kanban Meeting.

It’s been reported to me that in some organizations, the concept of a service delivery workflow is very weak, while the functional silos and structure are very strong. Usually, such companies lack any significant focus on customer satisfaction or any service-orientation in their thinking, mindset or value system. I’ve specifically had this reported to me from a large Swedish industrial company and several companies in China in the technology or finance sectors. In these instances, the change agents, usually process coaches or members of the PMO, felt it was necessary to create the Service Delivery Manager role as a specific position within the firm. The act of doing so, is actually making a very clear commitment to service delivery and customer satisfaction. In other words, the bar for the change initiative is raised – senior leaders are being asked to acknowledge that service delivery and customer satisfaction are important. They are being asked to explicitly put customer focus in the spotlight and make it part of the corporate value system. This is a non-trivial but hugely important step.

So where there is a current lack of customer focus and a lack of understanding of existing service delivery workflows, where the concept is weak, you need to create a position for SDMs.

When do we need a Service Request Manager?

A Service Request Manager is likely to be needed when contact with the customers, or service requestors is weak or distant. The SRM becomes a proxy or advocate for the customers. However, it is important that we don’t place the SRM in a decision making role. We don’t want them becoming a dysfunctional proxy for the customer, showing bias towards one over the others. We always want the SRM as the facilitator of selection not the person doing the selection. In organizations, where contact with the customers is weak, there is often already an intermediary possibly a sales engineer, an account manager, a product manager or in Agile adopting organizations a product owner. So we want to elevate that person’s role into the role of SRM. It is a set of new responsibilities, not a new position.

When the SRM role exists, the SRM will take on the responsibility for the Replenishment Meeting and will play roles in the Strategy Review and Risk Review.

When might we need SRM as a new position? If the SDM is the “flow manager” for service delivery, then the SRM is the “flow manager” for ideation or discovery. So we might expect to see SRM emerge as a specific role when we have an upstream or discovery kanban system. The more focus we have on ideation, option validation and discard, and discovery and validation of concepts (or minimum viable products, MVPs) the more likely we are to need a SRM as a specific position in our organization.

The SRM role is described as “marshalling options”. This is the act of facilitating flow, and discard or upstream kanban work.

When might we need both roles?

In discussing this amongst my colleagues and with leaders in the Kanban community, Mike Burrows commented, “I have seen the need for one or the other but never both.” And that is probably a fair statement, we have seen firms adopting SDM or SRM roles but so far we haven’t seen both, at least not explicitly. With larger scale ESP implementations, we do see a lot of SRMs. One client advertised for SRMs by placing job advertisements for Product Owners. This makes sense. You recruit for a title that people are familiar with, then you mold them into what you need. That client has a strong sense of service delivery and without doubt function managers or team leads are playing the role of SDM. It just hasn’t been made explicit in that company.

So I suspect that as we see greater emphasis on the use of Kanban upstream and the growth of Enterprise Services Planning, with business emerging where ESP/Kanban is _the_ way that they manage their professional services company then we will see strong growth and use of both SRM and SDM roles.

At smaller scale and where there is little ideation, option development and discard, and a strong connection to the customer together with a strong sense of service delivery, in these cases, I expect only one role, SDM, played by an existing member of the staff. So Kanban as we knew it in 2005-2008 doesn’t involve new positions or additional headcount, but the future with Enterprise Services Planning, particularly in organizations with a weak sense of service delivery and a lack of customer focus, we are likely to see the new job title of Service Delivery Manager emerge. In companies that do a lot of innovation and act as a market leader in an uncertain and emerging market, we are likely to see the emergence of Service Request Manager as a new position. Where both circumstances exist, we’ll see both roles in use, perhaps both as new positions and additional headcount.

Are Scrum & Scaled Agile Damaging Morale At Your Firm?

January 5, 2016 by David Anderson

In 2008 I was scheduled to give a talk to the Bay Area APLN meetup group. The meeting was being held at the offices of The Gap in downtown San Francisco. The organizers arranged to meet up for a reception in a bar prior to the meeting. As the guest of honor some of the attendees naturally wanted to talk with me. Waiting patiently and quietly for her turn was Janice Linden-Reed. Janice’s story has become a familiar one. She was a project manager at a company where they had adopted Scrum a couple of years earlier along with the Rally tool for work tracking. They’d received training and coaching from Rally but for the last 6 to 9 months Scrum was proving very painful for them and morale was suffering. Meanwhile, the Rally consultants only had one song to sing, “you aren’t doing it right! If only you followed all the practices of Scrum then everything would be fine.” That company was Posit Science, a company pioneering the commercialization of brain plasticity science, and its staff were a combination of PhD neuroscientists and game developers. They were smart, highly motivated people, who believed they were bringing some good to society with their technology and yet Scrum was making them miserable. They simply refused to buy the argument that the problem was with them.

Over this recent holiday period, Grant Ammons lit up social media with his blog post, “Ditching Scrum for Kanban – the best decision we’ve made as a team.”

What makes Grant’s story interesting is that his is just the latest in a long line of similar stories – a thread that can be traced over at least 8 years since I first met Janice Linden-Reed and first heard about Posit Science and their challenges with Scrum.

Since 2009, the Lean Kanban conference in the United States, has been sponsored by Ultimate Software. Ultimate sponsor our conferences as a thank you and in recognition of what Kanban has done to maintain their corporate culture and enable them to thrive since they made a decision to ditch Scrum. In 2008, Steve Reid and Rafael Santos from Ultimate attended Agile 2008 in Toronto looking for a solution to the misery that Scrum was bringing to their workforce. Their story was similar to Janice’s and similar to Grant’s, Scrum had helped them for a while, it had worked for a while, but after a period of 9 to 18 months, it was clear that it was having an irreconcilable negative impact on staff morale. Ultimate prided themselves on their status in the best 100 places to work list. In the most recent survey they are ranked 21st best large employer to work for in the United States. In 2008, their status on this list was in jeopardy and Scrum was a key source of the dissatisfaction that was bubbling in the workforce.

Every story is a little different but there are clear themes. Perhaps half of our clients and half of the attendees at Lean Kanban training around the world are people looking for answers to challenged, painful or failed Scrum implementations. The first thing to realize is that these are real stories and the facts are what they are: people felt the way they did and they acted according to their situation. Wishful thinking or post hoc analysis that they could have done things differently doesn’t change the facts. So what are the common themes in these and so many other stories of challenged Scrum adoption?…

Scrum worked and helped initially

With Posit Science and Pipeline Deals they were startups with smallish engineering teams and they simply needed some initial rigor, some process to follow and Scrum gave them that. With Ultimate, who were already larger, and several hundred engineers, Scrum helped them to focus on short term goals and to deliver more frequently. All of these were good things. So the initial reaction is nearly always positive. While I am only using 3 examples here there are many more such stories where people report, “Scrum helped us initially.” Here is another one by Charles Suscheck. You don’t have to look hard to find more like this on the Web.

Morale starts to drop after 9 to 18 months of using Scrum

All of these stories report that following Scrum started to damage morale after a period of time. There are usually several stated reasons for this: missed commitments / trouble planning and estimating; estimation and planning are taking too long and seem random, error prone, or just plain nonsensical; urgent work arrives more quickly than our sprint cadence and there is pressure to reduce the sprint length but we don’t know how to do that given the current overheads and the existing problems planning and estimating; there is pressure to break the sprint boundaries and add urgent work; product owners show favoritism to one stakeholder over others; product owners have trouble balancing demands from multiple stakeholders; stories are being split over multiple sprints and actual customer service is very poor with long lead times and a lack of predictability and transparency; product owners are suffering anxiety because they are making up numbers to facilitate prioritization and planning activities.

Scrum as a process is engineered to use peer pressure to produce results. This is true at the daily Scrum meeting where individuals make commitments on what they will work on and complete today and have to report the following day on whether they made their daily Scrum commitment, while entire teams makes sprint commitments for the collective work they will complete in a single time period such as two weeks. The problem with this peer pressure, commitment-based approach is that it uses very deterministic mechanisms for estimation and planning, in what is actually a non-deterministic domain. Meanwhile, the social engineering in Scrum also uses peer pressure to drive conformance. It is well understood in sociology that pressure to be part of a group can be strong and can often override individual judgment or logic. So when things aren’t working, individuals are pressured into believing the fault is with them, when in fact the fault is the use of deterministic methods in a domain that has a non-deterministic natural philosophy. When the system is to blame, Scrum teaches its practitioners to blame the people and not the system. This is at the core of the stress and dissatisfaction practitioners feel with Scrum.

I am now seeing similar reports from the field with Scaled Agile Framework which has largely adopted scaled up versions of many Scrum practices. It uses similar deterministic approaches to planning, estimation and prioritization over longer time periods. This practice is known as quarterly release train planning. Some of the same complaints – anxiety that the numbers were guessed in order to follow the process, and that attempts to resolve dependencies in advance are error prone and just guess work, while everyone is being held accountable for their commitments. Once, again, the same problem is being repeated – a deterministic approach is being used to plan 3 month windows of work when the underlying domain is non-deterministic. The practitioners are being set up for failure and made to carry the burden of this failure as their own incompetence.

When things go wrong the consultants always blame the people

In every one of these stories, when the people and organizations complain about the stress that Scrum is bringing to them individually and organizationally, they are universally told that the fault lies with them. Scrum works! Scrum is without flaws! The problem lies with them, if only they were doing it right everything would be wonderful.

As Ken Schwaber has said, “Scrum works! Scrum is designed to work in a context. Your job is to change your context so that Scrum will work for you.” And I truly believe that this is a genuinely correct statement. It, however, disguises the truly difficult bit, “your job is to change your context.” If we look at Grant Ammons story, or Janice Linden-Reed’s story (we use it in our training classes), or the Ultimate story (captured for a future book), or others on our web site such as Nemetschek Scia what we see is a pattern that these were all firms where the business they were in simply made it impossible for them to control their environment and to create a context in which Scrum would work. It wasn’t that they were doing it wrong, rather, in order for Scrum to work, they would have to have changed their business and their business model. Ultimately, canonical Scrum was poor choice for them. If it helped them initially, it should never have been intended as a final solution, instead it should be a first step on a journey of process change and improvement.

Earlier this week, Larry Maccherone shared this story and cumulative flow diagram via his Facebook page. If you read the comment thread you will see that Mike Beedle, one of the founders of Scrum posts his thoughts. Rather than look at the data and analyze it, he quickly jumps to the conclusion that neither Scrum nor Kanban could help these poor souls because they are evidently very poor at technical practices and need to shape up. Compare Mike’s response to mine, as someone seasoned in analyzing cumulative flow data and with a deep understanding of flow efficiency and lead time. This post and the comment thread deeply underscores the differences between Scrum and Kanban communities. With Scrum the practitioners are almost always belittled and blamed, with Kanban we seek to understand the underlying natural philosophy of the domain, understand how the system is operating within it, and seek to find the systemic problems. With Kanban the system is always the number one suspect, not the people working within that system.

Interesting phenomenon that I have seen many times in the past. I have to say though that all but one such example in my…

Posted by Larry Maccherone on Saturday, January 2, 2016

Scrum failure stories often involve leaders in the community and professional certified trainers and coaches

There are many stories of failed Kanban in the market: sometimes the failure comes from inappropriate alignment with culture such as resistance to transparency that comes with adopting Kanban boards; sometimes the failure comes from a failure to install and this would generally be avoidable if the protagonists had taken Kanban System Design training; sometimes a proto-Kanban implementation would have been easier initially than a full Kanban and a trained coach would have been able to help the organization scale the depth of their Kanban to the current level of organizational maturity and leadership tolerance. In general, where we see failed Kanban in the market, the failures come in organizations where they had no training, and did not invest in qualified trainers or consultants with credentials from Lean Kanban University.

However, with Scrum the failure stories are often very different. Often large numbers of the work force have been given certified training from Scrum Alliance certified trainers. Often leading consulting firms are involved and all of their consultants had certifications and professional credentials from the Scrum Alliance or other similar bodies. Despite the available expertise, Scrum remains challenged or fails and the story follows the pattern described in 1 through 3 above.

At Posit Science all their Scrum training and coaching was conducted by Rally, the largest Agile consulting firm in the World. At Ultimate the Scrum training had been conducted by Jeff Sutherland and later by Mike Cohn. Despite having two of the leading 3 Scrum experts in the World, Ultimate were unable to make it work.

The conclusion I’ve come to during the last 15 years of Agile is that Scrum has been widely oversold. There is no doubt that it can and does work but the circumstances under which it can be effective are rarely considered. There has in this respect been a considerable amount of professional misconduct in the overselling and the failure to make any reasonable consideration of context when choosing to implement it. The standard practice of blaming the people in the organizations having Scrum forced upon them inappropriately is a practice that is both morally and ethically bankrupt.

The importance of context and appropriate application of methods

Kanban is not an Agile software development method or process. Kanban was deliberately designed as a mechanism that acts on existing underlying processes. There needs to be an existing context into which we apply Kanban. So fundamentally Kanban eliminates a whole class of potential mis-selling of Agile methods. Kanban is the “start with what you do now” method and evolve from there. Every Kanban implementation will have its own unique workflow and policies. As a consequence, Kanban is adaptable to your context and culture.

However, this is not to say that we haven’t learned a lot about applying Kanban in specific situations. We now have the Kanban Appropriateness Appraisal Framework and the Depth of Kanban Assessment Framework. Both of these coaching tools are part of the standard curriculum for Kanban Coaching Professional training. The appropriateness appraisal looks at both the appropriateness of use of pull systems and the cultural fit for an evolutionary approach to change and incremental improvement. Not every organization has a suitable culture or the appropriate level of organizational maturity or leadership tolerance for Kanban to work. We now know that specific styles of Kanban implementation, implementations at different depths, correlate with different levels of organizational maturity, and as a consequence of this we now train Kanban coaches to be aware of this and to initially apply Kanban practices at an appropriate level of depth. The Appropriateness Appraisal and the Depth of Kanban Assessment Framework go hand-in-hand to insure a much greater level of success with Kanban implementations. It is the use of tools such as these and the knowledge and experience that went into creating them that mean you truly get value when employing a qualified Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP).

And meanwhile, it is never the people who take the blame for challenges with Kanban implementations with the exception of instances where the protagonists quite clearly never received any Kanban training or coaching, and did not make any attempt to actually understand what it is or how it works before they attempted to use it. At some level there is no accounting for stupidity. When people stick a board on the wall and declare they are doing Kanban, if it fails to produce the gains they were hoping for then the fault is quite clearly with them. Meanwhile, our community has an extensive capability for learning, including formal events such as Kanban Leadership Retreats which have led to the development of specific consulting tools such as the Depth of Kanban Assessment Framework and the Kanban Appropriateness Appraisal.

If you are feeling the stress and anxiety or a challenged Scrum or Scaled Agile implementation and you are sick of being told that the fault is with you, then there is an alternative path to agility – consider Kanban in 2016 and see how far it can take you!

Kanban Does Not Share Your Agile Team Agenda

January 5, 2016 by David Anderson

In November 2013 the Kanban coaching community agreed that we recognized 3 specific agendas that come with Kanban implementations: sustainability; service-orientation; and survivability. The first of these three is shared with Agile software development methodologies. The other two are distinctly unique to Kanban and its focus on improved service delivery and evolutionary change. However, Agile software development methodologies come with a distinct cross-functional team agenda. Kanban does not share this, nor does it need to in order to produce exceptional process improvement results. The Kanban approach is to visualize, improve transparency and understanding, reduce coordination costs through the use of boards. Visualize, Don’t Reorganize!

Agile consultants like to talk about teams a lot. My Kanban book talked about teams a lot too. And that was a mistake. I was using team to mean “a group of people who come together to achieve a common goal.” However, in Agile vernacular a team is actually an organizational unit, albeit, one that has been constructed to have a common goal or purpose, such as delivering working software. Agile Consultants generally set about reorganizing you into “teams” and when the work has variation and variety in it that require multiple specialist skills then these teams are referred to as cross-functional teams – teams containing multiple functions. The goal is to eventually cross-skill people on the team so that they are generalists who can perform all and any function, or T-shape people, who have a broad skillset at a shallow level of competence while maintaining a specialization in a single narrow skill with a deep level of competence.

The Agile bargain is that the pain of the reorganization will pay off in the performance of the new cross-functional teams, that they will achieve high levels of efficiency by eliminating delay in hand-offs between functions and eliminate coordination overhead between different functional groups. If you contain everything you need in a single organizational unit then you don’t have to worry about external dependencies. If these organizational units can be small, say 6 people, then coordination overhead should be minimal to non-existent.

And let’s just say that it works. Let’s not even challenge that theory with any performance data or anecdotal evidence that Agile organizations actually spend a lot of time and coordination overhead resolving dependencies and negotiating for scarce skills and availability of shared resources. Let’s ignore that often there aren’t enough scarce skilled people to go around and that bickering, in-fighting and land-grabbing behavior becomes common during Agile planning. Let’s ignore all of that and assume it works.

What I would like you to consider in this post is this, how expensive in time, money, stress and anxiety is the reorganization into these cross-functional teams? I’d like to posit that a large amount of the pain of Agile transitions and the large amount of the coaching needed for new Agile teams is caused by the stress of reorganizing into cross-functional teams. In other words, one of the reasons Agile is costing so much, is because of the cross-functional team agenda.

Kanban does not share Agile’s cross-functional team agenda. Instead Kanban solves this problem a different way. The diagram explains how. The upper half shows a simplified functional organizational hierarchy divided into 8 functions labeled A through H. Each of these functions is a functional team – a group of specialists in some skill or professional service.

The customer makes a request which involves provision of 7 of these services. The Agile solution to this would be to reorganize into teams with all 7 of these skills represented. Kanban takes a different approach. Kanban is the, “start with what you do now method” and that means you start with the organizational structure you have now. Instead Kanban asks us to model the workflow for the customer service request. We would do this using the STATIK (Systems Thinking Approach to Implementing Kanban) method taught in the 2-day Kanban Systems Design classes from Lean Kanban University. This would give us the Kanban Board displayed in the lower half of the diagram. The Kanban Board is said to be “service-oriented” because it models the required service from the customer’s perspective. The board enables members from all 7 teams to collaborate to deliver the service requests to the customer.

This diagram is simplified for pedagogical purposes. In reality the board design may not have a 1-1 mapping from functional team to column or state in the workflow. Some functions may happen in parallel or in an undefined sequence. We may choose to model activities to be performed using checkboxes on the tickets rather than columns on the board. There is a lot of subtlety and most of these nuances are covered in the training. A qualified Kanban Coaching Professional would be expected to provide guidance on when to model an activity on the board and when to model it on the ticket.

Kanban delivers on the definition of team, I envisaged when writing the Kanban book, “a group of people who come together to achieve a common goal.” The common goal is satisfying the customer request. It is a service-oriented goal. The board and the ticket design provide visualization and insight on the goal. We have plenty of case study evidence to show that this approach works. Many Kanban adopters report increased levels of collaboration at their firms and that this was achieved without painful reorganization, or allocating anyone a new role, responsibility or job title. Kanban improves collaboration through customer focused visualization and creating shared goals for dynamically formed teams of people drawn from different functional groups. With the right board design, it works for shared resources, shared services, functional silos, and of course, it will always work for existing cross-functional teams.

The results from Kanban have been impressive since the beginning. In 2005, the first kanban system spanned across three functional groups and resulted in 230% greater productivity, 90%+ reduction in lead times, and 0% to 98% improvement in predictability and on-time delivery performance. Since then these numbers have been shown to be somewhat mundane. 400% is often reported. 800% has been reported. 50%-90% drops in lead times are common. All of this is achieved without the pain of reorganizing into cross-functional teams; without the pain of Agile transition initiatives; without the cost of Agile transitions and the overhead of Agile coaching.

So even if the cross-functional team does deliver greatly reduced coordination overhead, and even if this does make them “awesome” and “hyper-productive”, and frankly that is a debate that really needs to be had, and if there was any reasonable data, it needs to be studied carefully, but let’s imagine it is all true, given that would it still be a lot faster, easier, cheaper and better to land 200-800% productivity gains, and 50-90% reduction in delivery times from starting with what you do now, and Kanbanizing it? Visualize, don’t reorganize!

Will Role-based Training Be Introduced Into Kanban?

Proto-Replenishment Semi-Push System