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:
- See your work as a flow of value to your customer
- Start from where you are
- Visualize your work, your process and your policies
- 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:
We can express the answer to that question with 4 quite similar steps:
- See your organisation as a network of inter-dependent services
- Scale out sequentially, service by service
- Design each service independently from first principles
- 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
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 Kanban. http://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)
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