Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Kanban: How to Start; How to Scale

How to start...

Several years ago I published my shortest possible advice on "How to start using Kanban". Not being restricted by arbitrary limits like 140 characters, I would express these steps today as:
  1. See your work as a flow of value to your customer
  2. Start from where you are
  3. Visualize your work, your process and your policies
  4. Adopt validated changes that improve things
Note that the first three of these steps do not involve changing what you are currently doing, how you are doing it, who is doing it, or what their role is called. The changes are: to your viewpoint (Kanban is a way of seeing, as much as it is a way of changing); to your approach to change (in an evolutionary way, from where you are); and to the use of visualisation (to make invisible knowledge work visible, as well as the process and policies - like controlling WiP - that apply to it).

The fourth step though, is to start improving things. It's good to see that previous critics of Kanban are recognising the value of these lessons, even where some of a process's previously inviolable "rules" might be breached. Provided we have a clear idea of what makes a product, a process, or an organisation fit for purpose, and provided the changes proposed can be shown to improve things, it's foolish not to change.

Kanban is often caricatured as only being applicable to small teams (say 3-12 people), or to processes with only small work items. In fact, this process of visualising the work and process, and improving the flow of value using Kanban's general practices, is applicable across a wide range of scales, contexts, and organisational maturity.

So if you're starting from a few teams using Kanban at the team level (a reasonable place to start by the way), how do you scale to using Kanban across an organisation?

How to scale...

We can express the answer to that question with 4 quite similar steps:
  1. See your organisation as a network of inter-dependent services
  2. Scale out sequentially, service by service
  3. Design each service independently from first principles
  4. Use feedback loops through the management system to achieve balance and improve service delivery to customers
Like the first "how-to", this one starts with changing how you see. I've spoken more about this in my sessions on the Kanban Lens. The way we "see" - our instinctive way of modelling the world around us - has the greatest impact on our interpretation of new situations and ultimately our behaviour. Letting how you see change is a most powerful door into new possibilities.

Specifically "seeing services" is not instinctive. We're more likely to look at organisations through a "departmental" lens (people with similar functions or roles in the the organisation), or through a "small team" lens (the groups of people that get things done together). What is often missing is how departments and teams fit together to deliver value to the organisation's "customers". Changing to that as your default viewpoint, brings quite different issues into focus. It has a powerful impact.

Scaling out service by service again may not be management's instinctive approach. If we've found a better process, why not roll it out across the whole business together, in the shortest possible time? The answer to that question lies in Kanban's foundational principles, specifically the change management principles. These can summarised as "start from what you do now... and change in an evolutionary manner, learning and applying the lessons learned as you go." In practice, that's what the most successful organisations have found as they roll out Kanban. It is not slower to move incrementally. You get there faster because you don't generate massive fear and resistance within the organisation, and most importantly you learn as you go, while it's still not too late to apply the lessons.

If you want to know more about the third step - often referred to as STATIK (systems thinking approach to introducing Kanban), we discuss it (albeit briefly) in Essential Kanban Condensed. It's one of the main elements in the KMP 1 training syllabus - see this course from Huge.IO for example, Kanban System Design.

Finally the fourth step - using the Kanban Cadences, is the subject of the next blog (as well as the follow-on training . Watch this space.


References and Credits
Anderson, David J. 2016. "Kanban’s Change Management Principles", Lean Kanbanhttp://anderson.leankanban.com/kanbans-change-management-principles/
Anderson, David J., and Andy Carmichael. 2016. Essential Kanban Condensed. Lean Kanban University Press. http://leankanban.com/guide
Carmichael, Andy. 2013. “How to Adopt Kanban”, Improving Projects.http://xprocess.blogspot.co.uk/ 2013/05/how-to-adopt-kanban.html
Carmichael, Andy. 2013. “There are 6 general practices of Kanban...”, Improving Projects.   http://xprocess.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/there-are-6-core-practices-of-kanban.html
“Kanban (development)”. Wikipedia. Retrieved July 7, 2017,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)


Monday, February 26, 2018

The Kanban Lens: a way to see

The Kanban Lens is a way to see your work. Specifically it asks us to see:
  • work as flow 
  • workflow as knowledge discovery steps
  • knowledge work as a service
  • organizations as networks of services
I got involved with the Kanban community not very long ago - in 2012. I wanted to understand what the Kanban method was. People were saying “it’s better than this” or “worse than that”. But they weren't telling me what it was! The only detailed explanations came from critics or tool vendors, and to be frank neither of those sources were particularly reliable. I knew about the general practices of Kanban and its principles for change management. I even understood kanban systems, which are used in Kanban, just as they are in manufacturing and delivery systems, to ensure we only start work when our customers actually want it, and we have the capacity finish it.
Video of the "Kanban Lens" lightning talk (7 minutes)

But that still didn’t explain what the Kanban method was.

A few years ago Rodrigo Yoshima used an eye-opening phrase in a talk he did at Lean Kanban North America: the “Lean flow paradigm”. It helped me understand that Kanban is not a process, or a recipe, or a framework. It’s how to see work. This is what brings together the many and various parts that make up the Kanban method. In 2013, David Anderson blogged about this, coining the phrase “the Kanban Lens” and recently I’ve been talking to David again about its definition, looking for a simple form of words that captures the Kanban “way of seeing”.

There are four elements to the Kanban Lens.

1. See work as flow

Firstly… “See work as flow.” Or more explicitly: See work as a flow “from customer need, to needs met.” This is the starting point for using Kanban. Before you change the organisation, or the process, or the roles and responsibilities, or anyone’s job title, change how you view your work. Seeing work as flow may seem obvious. Except that this is completely against most managers' and most professionals' instincts. It's not how work is traditionally managed. When you look at what people actually do, it's clear; most of us are more concerned about people who are not busy, than work items that are not flowing!

Change your viewpoint. Don’t view your work as being busy at your skill, or your role. Work has value because, we fulfil customers’ needs. By visualising work and ensuring it's made up of small, distinct items, the flow of work becomes visible. Ensuring each work item is coherent and valued by the customer, means genuine value can be delivered to the customer as each item is delivered.

That’s how work flows. Workflows... that's the second element of the lens...

2. See workflow as a sequence of knowledge discovery steps

Workflow as a sequence of knowledge discovery steps is something that often puzzles people. It cuts across how we've traditionally looked at workflow - as hand-offs between individuals or teams. However the columns on a kanban board should not be viewed as representing the teams of people that handle the work. Look through a different lens. The workflow shows the progress of the work item, through different learning activities, until we know enough about each item, to convert the ideas and options into delivered value.

“Really? How can we expect a linear monotonic process to represent such complex activities?”

The answer is that we don’t, and it doesn’t. The steps in a Kanban process are states of the item. In each state there’s a dominant means of learning (of knowledge discovery), using people and skills as needed. This is how to build effective, improvable services.

3. See knowledge work as a service

The third element of the Kanban lens is to “See knowledge work as a service.”

Again this raises eyebrows. “Isn’t it obvious that knowledge work is a service? Accountants and tax men call it a service. The product is intangible. There is no manufacturing involved.” But that’s not the source of the controversy. Our instinct is to manage what’s visible – the people; rather than what’s invisible – the work being produced. The Kanban Lens asks us to focus on the work, not the workers, and to see that work as a service.

A service implies the existence of a customer, needing, and ultimately benefiting from, the work.
It implies care on the part of the service provider…
  • to know what makes the service fit for the customer’s purpose, and 
  • to what degree, and when, it can be delivered.
Sometimes a service delivers to an internal customer. That’s okay, indeed it’s inevitable in larger contexts. But don’t lose sight of the real customer, nor those that deliver direct to that customer. Our work enables them to fulfil customer needs.

4, See your organisation as a network of services

Multiple inter-dependent services require organising, and that's where the fourth element of the lens comes in. “See your organisation as a network of services.”

Network here is a general term. Typically we see
  • chains of services 
  • hierarchies of services, and
  • inter-connected services 
We can even see multiple services on a single board, as this one from Wikipedia, which has chains of services… (sequences), hierarchies of services… (decomposed work, with the lower level items handled by different services), and inter-connected services… (where blockers on work items on this board are work in someone else’s service).
Sample Kanban Board.png
[CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

These networks must be balanced by adjusting the policies and resources to ensure flow and timely delivery. Management cadences for improvement are therefore vital, particularly an Operations Review, which interacts with multiple services.

Scaling Kanban depends on this first step of seeing the organisation differently… as a network of services. The "org. chart" is no help for this. But when people see the services, and their customers, they can
  • self-organise to the work
  • cut the waste of siloed thinking and redundant activities, and
  • generate improvements from within… across the organisation.
This is what “Whole Organisation Kanban” means. It’s all a part of looking at work differently, using the Kanban Lens to...
  1. See work as flow (from customer need, to needs met), 
  2. See workflow as a sequence of knowledge discovery steps
  3. See knowledge work as a service
  4. See your organisation as a network of services
That’s the Kanban Lens!


References and Credits
Anderson, David J. 2011 “Understanding the Process of Knowledge Discovery”. DJAA blog: http://www.djaa. com/understanding-process-knowledge-discovery
Anderson, David J. 2013 “The Kanban Lens”. DJAA blog: http://www.djaa.com/kanban-lens
Anderson, David J., and Andy Carmichael. 2016. Essential Kanban Condensed. Lean Kanban University Press. http://leankanban.com/guide
Carmichael, Andy. 2013. “How to Adopt Kanban”, Improving Projects. http://xprocess.blogspot.co.uk/ 2013/05/how-to-adopt-kanban.html
Carmichael, Andy. 2017. "Sample Kanban Board“, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File%3ASample_Kanban_Board.png 
Ebbesen, Bill. “Lenses” Photo. Transferred from en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=11430342
“Kanban (development)”. Wikipedia. Retrieved July 7, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(develop ment)
Kennedy, Michael. 2012. “Set-Based Decision Making”, Lean Software and Systems Conference, Boston, MA. Video: https://vimeo.com/42785298
USDA, “Large format camera” Photo.  PD-USGov-USDA-ARS. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A Large_format_camera_lens.jpg

Yoshima, Rodrigo. 2013. "Management and Change - Avoiding the Rocks," Lean Kanban North America, https://www.slideshare.net/rodrigoy/management-and-change-avoidin.

Zheglov, Alexei. 2014. “Beyond VSM: Understanding and mapping your process of knowledge discovery”, Lean Kanban Central Europe. Slides: https://goo.gl/ay6P7U, Video: https://vimeo.com/ 114542264 

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