Friday 7 December 2012

Need to do more? Try slowing down! What you missed...


Have you ever had so much going on that you don't know where to start? Or you've got your toe in so many tasks/projects that it seems like nothing ever gets DONE? 

Mike Edwards (@mikeeedwards) led our December session, showing  how Kanban can help bring focus and faster resolution to our workday. He made it clear, though, that Kanban doesn't work in all situations; it has to be a good mix with the corporate culture.
Check out this You Tube clip he showed the group to demonstrate how easy it is for people to get distracted when there's a lot going on (Change Blindness video link).

Five simple Kanban rules


  1. Visualize the work 
  2. Limit WIP: inventory is waste!
  3. Measure and monitor 
  4. Make processes and policies explicit - make the rules visual, okay for rules to evolve (i.e. How to handle blocks, Batch size (wip) limit, Goal of completion rate)
  5. How to treat urgent items and their limit (very disruptive)

The basic idea with Kanban is that you capture a list of task using post-it notes and then you 'pull' tasks into the next column as capacity allows. There's a limit on how many tasks can be worked on at one time, so capacity only opens up once a task is FULLY completed.

Sample Kanban Boards


To DoWork-In-ProgressCompleted
                     
or ...
BacklogRequirementsDesignDevelopTestDeploy
E
F
G
C
D
A
B


or...
Plan/DefineBuildVerifyImplement
                                          

Group Exercise

We did a group exercise that quickly demonstrated his point. A small 'work line' was set up a BA creating batches of requirements which went through a series of developers until it was handed to the customer for final acceptance testing. The first round was chaos and then Mike gradually added more rigour by limited the work in progress. 

Take a look at the results in the '# Accepted' row in the below picture; there's your proof! 

Monday 12 November 2012

Next Limited WIP Society Session Announced

A survey of attendees at our last meeting revealed that 80% of people were curious about the basics and how-to's of Kanban.  With that in mind the December 4th meeting will be a hands on introduction to Kanban by Mike Edwards.

Need to speed up?  Then slow down! A practical introduction to Kanban.
December 4th, 2012. 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. at Communitech

If the title grabbed your attention it’s likely because ‘slowing down to speed up’ is counter intuitive to what we learn in school, business, and life in general. Many managers believe the best way to get more work from their people is to speed up, or push more work into the system. I’ve seen many managers add work to the pile “to ensure they don’t run out of work to do”. Unfortunately this is the worst thing you can do, as much like cars merging at a bottleneck of the highway during rush hour the high volume actually causes significant back-ups. 

During this workshop we will start with a simulation game where a development team will be creating a product according to customer specs! Through a refinement of the exercise we will demonstrate the impact of too much work in the system, identifying the bottlenecks, and strategies for improving the flow of work. Participants will come away with an understanding of the basic mechanics and concepts behind Kanban. Most importantly participants will come away with a better understanding of the nature of work, and the impact our behaviours have on the outcome.

Too many teams do not make great decisions regarding the work they agree to take on.   Unfortunately this can often result in poor performance, which is often not talked about.  In fact many people claim to be Agile, when all they’ve done is adopted the Scrum methodology.  Most management methodologies focus on process or product.  Kanban focuses on the flow of work, making it visible and providing a platform for organizational improvement. Through the use of these very simple tools you can significantly improve the results on your projects! Even if you don’t adopt Kanban you will find the concepts useful in guiding you in any project, and how you manage the work you and others do.   

Mike Edwards started his career 25 years ago as a software developer. In the past 15 years his career has gone down the path of leading and managing IT. Mike has recently carved a new path through the wilderness and is now an independent consultant.

A few years ago Mike started incorporating Lean & Agile into his world dominated by PMI. It didn't take long for Mike to figure out how this shift was going to rock his world! Mike has had success bringing together Lean & Agile to help teams transform their world! Although he works with the whole team, his specialty is helping the project management office increase their value. Mike's true passion surfaces when he has an opportunity to speak or teach at events across Canada each year. 

You can follow Mike on Twitter , LinkedInand on his new blog.

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Not just change, but LEAN change!

We've all experienced change in the workplace... some good and some not so good - although it seems like we have more experience with the bad & ugly. What makes change management so difficult? Oh right - there's the people factor. People are unique and will react differently.

Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui from Deloitte presented their thoughts on 'Lean Change' to the KW Limited WIP Society on September 10th. Their methodology is a combination of Kotter's 8 Steps, Lean Kanban, and Ash Maurya's 'Running Lean' principles.

Lean Canvas

I was introduced to a new concept called a 'Lean Canvas'. It's a one page business model that is produced on a large scale (whiteboard, empty wall) to ensure visibility. It reminded me of an A3, only blown up from its 11x17 piece of paper. In Kanban style, post-it notes are used on the Canvas to capture key points.
The Canvas presented by Jeff and Alexis captured key points on Urgency, Vision, Success Criteria, Target State, Action, Change Recipients, and Wins/Benefits.
At the bottom of the Canvas, Action Post-It Notes were moved Kanban style from a 'to-do' pile, to a 'work-in-progress' pile in the middle, and finally to 'done' once fully completed.

 

Change Risk

Three types of change were addressed in the presentation:
  1. Change risk: will the business problem be fixed or do we have the wrong change?
  2. Resistance risk: will people adopt the change or is it a bad "fit" (i.e. cultural barriers)?
  3. Sustainability risk: will people continue with the change?

Organisations need the ability to continually transform their people, processes and technology. Lean Change is a relatively new concept. It was interesting to learn a new application for Kanban methods. Having stakeholders involved in building a Canvas and Action Plan using visual Kanban should increase buy-in and enhance chances of a successful change adoption. And if not, the team can work together on another change option (using an iterative approach) to find the best solution to address the problem.

For more from the experts... check out http://agileconsulting.blogspot.ca/

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Thoughts on AgileTour Toronto 2012

AgileTour Toronto is a highly recommended annual, one-day Agile conference in our region.  It is a great, low-cost opportunity to learn, meet experts, and share experiences with hundreds of practitioners from the Greater Toronto Area and Southern Ontario.  The conference usually has a well balanced program that has something for everyone, regardless of their functional role.  The 2012 edition of this conference, taking place will not be an exception.

Warning: the tickets to this conference went on sale this week!  Last year, they sold out in less than one full week; this year, the venue is bigger, so it may take the organizers a bit longer to sell them out.  Don't procrastinate.

Now I would like to highlight several sessions in the conference program that might be of interest to our group.  In the participant survey during the September meeting (thank you everyone who attended and filled it out), many people asked for some introductory and how-to content related to Lean and Kanban.  As one of the organizers, I assure you that we will be offering such content in the upcoming meetings of the Limited WIP Society.  But in the meantime, there is this great local conference where you might get some useful ideas sooner.

Here is the link to the conference program.  The session descriptions are not finalized yet (as one of the speakers, I know that the deadline to jazz them up is October 16th), however, you can get a pretty good idea of what most sessions will be about.

Manvir Singh Grewal and Brandon Byars will speak about the Lean Data Architecture.  Their experience report from applying Lean thinking to data warehousing and mapping the value stream of business intelligence sounds fascinating.  Mike Edwards will "ask", The Lean PMO: Oxymoron or Possible?  I suppose his answer is possible and he will show how we can rethink the concept of PMO so that it can create value in an Agile organization.  Jeff Anderson will present Lean Change: Enabling Agile Transformation through Lean Startup, Kanban, and Kotter, repeating his September presentation to our group, in case you missed it.

Yours truly will be Unveiling Kanban - it's a gamified, illustrated introduction to the Kanban method.  I am also teaming up with Gerry Kirk to introduce you to Personal Kanban.  Our joint session is titled Lean Coffee or an Introduction to Personal Kanban.  And last, but not least, if you want to get a taste of Seattle-style Lean Coffee, we'll do our best to organize one at this conference - arrive one hour before the official start and join one of us in the breakfast room.







Monday 24 September 2012

Enabling Agile Transformation

On September 10 Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui gave the presentation Enabling Agile Transformation through Lean Startup Methods. This was the first speakers session organized by the Limited WIP Society of KWCG and the community support was fantastic as almost 50 people were in attendance.
The presentation was a fascinating discussion on using Lean startup principles and Kanban to create high feedback collaborative systems within large organizations.
The session was interactive and allowed for a great deal of conversation within the group and is available for review.

Saturday 18 August 2012

Announcing the Speakers for the Upcoming September 10th Meeting: Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui

The next meeting of the Limited WIP Society of Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph will take place on September 10, 5:30-7:30pm at the Tannery Building in Kitchener.


We are pleased to announce Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui as the speakers.

Their topicEnabling Agile Transformation through Lean Startup Methods

AbstractScrum, Kanban and other agile methods provide a means to transform IT to a high maturity state. Yet anyone who has been part of a large scale agile transformation can tell you that outcomes are anything but predictable. Sometimes these transformations succeed, sometimes they provide mixed results, sometimes the transformation outright fails. The change tactics used, and the specific methods chosen for adoption vary wildly depending on context. In a nutshell, the only certainty about large-scale agile transformation it is to expect uncertainty.
Eric Ries definition of a startup is as follows: "A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.  By this definition, an enterprise Agile change initiative could be deemed a startup, one that could take advantage of Lean Startup techniques.
During this session we will present a case study on how a team of Agile change agents leveraged the Lean Startup approach to enable validated learning on a large scale organizational transformation.  We'll discuss how we tested the assumptions behind our transformation by introducing incremental waves of change we have dubbed "Minimal Viable Changes".   We will showcase how we cycled through a continuous learn, build, and measure loop to steer the course of our transformation.  Finally, We'll give an overview of our key pivot/pursue decisions, and describe how the lean startup approach provided us with the feedback required to make several significant changes in direction during the course of the transformation.

About the speakersJeff Anderson started his professional life as your typical IT development geek. He tried to create software delivery joy through the use of things like patterns, agile methods, and overall object-oriented goodness.  Jeff continued to be disappointed in the way IT delivery projects were managed, the reason they were started, and how they ended up.

This dissatisfaction with the status quo led him to gradually embrace a new mission in life, to help IT workers become awesome.  To that end Jeff has created the Deloitte LEAN service offering, providing advisory, coaching, and change management services to IT departments.  He has built this capability within Deloitte to help IT clients truly transform the way they operate their business. Jeff has played a leadership role in some of the largest Kanban based enterprise transformations worldwide.  Recently he has guided several large public sector organizations along the path of organizational maturity. 

Jeff continues to add new tools to his organizational transformation utility belt including, lean startup, gamification, design thinking, and other collaborative, high feedback systems necessary to developing the next generation of work environments for knowledge professionals.  Jeff is a passionate member and a fellow of the Lean Systems Society and is the first Canadian to win a Brickell Key award nomination.  Jeff blogs frequently atagileconsulting.blogspot.com. Jeff is the proud father of his brand new daughter Mila, and lucky enough to be the husband of the most amazing wife in the world, Barbara.

The presentation will take place from 6:00pm to 7:30pm.  The doors will open at 5:30pm.  You're very welcome to join us for networking.  Food and drinks will be served.

If you'd like to attend, simply "like" or "+1" this page or post a short comment so that we can better estimate the number of participants.  We'd also appreciate it if you registered on this RSVP page.

Notes from Organizational Meeting in July

I'm posting some notes from the organizational meeting of the Limited WIP Society that took place in Kitchener in July.

The meeting was a lean coffee where many topics were proposed and not only by those who were physically present.  The meeting lasted about 90 minutes.


There was a lot of discussion about the group's mission.  It turned out that nobody could state it off the top of their head better than what we had already written before on the Communitech site: "The Limited WIP Society’s purpose is to facilitate learning of Lean principles and practices and the Kanban method in software, IT and other types of knowledge work. It is the meeting place for all local professionals who are interested in Lean, Kanban, systems thinking and continuous improvement."

A brainstorm of possible agenda for one year ahead showed that there is enough Lean/Kanban topics to fill the monthly schedule.  This result is similar to what we got during a similar discussion in January during the open-space Agile/Lean Peer2Peer meeting.

Another important topic was the relationship with the Agile/Lean P2P group.  We spoke of both groups having similar intent (to provide a safe, inclusive meeting and learning place and high-quality content to those in our region who want to learn about better, modern ways to develop software and do IT work and and improve their teams and organizations), but being managed in a decentralized manner.

We also spoke about many important issues around the communications, promoting the group, and the roles of its champions and volunteers.

And here is the meeting mindmap:

Sunday 22 July 2012

Welcome

Welcome to the Limited WIP Society KWCG.The purpose of our group is to promote learning about Lean and Kanban methods in software development, IT, and other types of knowledge work and to be a meeting place for local professionals who want to learn and share their knowledge and experience in this subject matter. 

This group is associated with the global Limited WIP Society and it is also a Peer2Peer (P2P) group within Communitech. We will work with the global Lean-Kanban community and also locally through Communitech.