Post on 11-May-2015
Copyright © 2011 Constant Contact Inc.
Agile The Kanban Way
PMI: Central MA Chapter
Gil IrizarryConstant Contact
2Copyright © 2011 Constant Contact, Inc.
Learning Objectives
• Learn what Kanban is
• Learn value stream mapping and how to apply it to your team
• Learn how to read a cumulative flow diagram
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Agenda
• A bit about me and Constant Contact
• Theory –
• Motivations
• Background
• What is Kanban and how does it work
• Practice –
• Setting up a Kanban board
• Establishing policies and limits
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My background
• Program Manager at Constant Contact
• Over 20 years software development and management experience, over 5 years in an agile software development environment
• CSM and PMP certifications, Kanban coaching training with David Anderson
• BS from Cornell, ALM from Harvard, certificate in Management from MIT Sloan
• girizarry@constantcontact.com, gil@conoa.com
• http://www.slideshare.net/conoagil
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Background on Constant Contact
• SaaS company offering on-line e-mail marketing, event marketing and surveys. Recent enhancements extend the services to the social media space
• >$200MM gross revenue per year
• >850 employees
• >475K paying customers
• Engineering and Operations total about 150 people
• First Scrum team formed in 2006
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Motivations
• We want to move to Agile management methods. Why?
• React quicker to changing market conditions
• Get new features to users more quickly
• Frequent releases are smaller releases
• Better Quality
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Quick Review of Scrum
• Fixed iterations
• Daily stand-ups
• What did you do yesterday, what did you do today, any impediments
• Retrospectives
• Burn-down chart
• Board with To Do, In Progress and Done states
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Lean Principles
• Eliminate Waste
• Build Quality In
• Create Knowledge
• Defer Commitment
• Deliver Fast
• Respect People
• Optimize the WholeLeading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
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What is Kanban?
• A scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.
• An effective tool to support the running of the production system as a whole.
• An excellent way for promoting improvements because reducing the number of work cards in circulation highlighted problem areas
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
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Foundational Principles of Kanban
• Start with what you do now
• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
• Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles
From: http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/the_principles_of_the_kanban_method (David Anderson)
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5 Core Properties of Kanban
• Visualize the workflow
• Team board states are a reflection of the value stream
• Limit WIP
• Manage Flow
• Implied that flow should be continuous
• Make Process Policies Explicit
• Improve Collaboratively (using models & the scientific method)
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Kanban and Roles
Lead Team
Org
• Prioritization• Definition• Ready-Ready
• Work mgmt.• Metrics• Improvement
• Delivery• Flow
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You are one team!
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Value Mapping Exercise
How do you make dinner?
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Sample Value Stream
Drive to
market 30 min
Shop for
food 30 min
Drive home
30 min
Unpack groceries 5 min
Wash Pots 15 min
Cook Food
15 min
Serve Dinner 5 min
Eat!
50 min / 130 min = 38% efficiency
Value:
No Value:
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Map the value stream in your group/dept./firm
• Work with your teams or teams on which you are dependent in order to drive more efficiency
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Sample Kanban Board
States
Cla
sses o
f S
erv
ice
WIP Limits
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Pull, not Push
• Work items should be pulled into available lanes
• Work should not be pushed when completed, even if its lane is full
Pull: Push:
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Limit WIP
• Why?
• Less multitasking
• Less time lost to context switching
• Better quality
• Smoother flow
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Classes of Service
• Different types of work need to be handled and prioritized differently
• We manage this through the concept of classes of service. Similar projects are grouped into classes and each class is assigned an allocation.
• For example, we may decide that 20% of ops time should be spent on infrastructure improvements, and 80% spent on servicing development
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Sample CFD
11/9/2010 11/28/201012/17/2010 1/5/2011 1/24/2011 2/12/2011 3/3/2011 3/22/2011 4/10/2011 4/29/20110
10
20
30
40
50
60
User StoryMockupsReady-DoneIn DevelopmentDev DoneIn TestingComplete
Cycle Time
WIP
What happened here?
Lead Time
Potential Bottlenecks
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Team Kanban
• Teams plan continuously. Backlogs should be constantly groomed.
• Teams test continuously
• It’s OK if a team finds a defect on the last day of the release. Pull the feature or delay the release, but keep the flow continuous
• It’s OK if a team starts work for the next release in the current release
• Aim for development and testing to flow more smoothly through your system
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Metrics
• Considering gathering the following:
• Cycle time on items after grouping them by size:
• Completion time for small, medium and large
• Spread of cycle times
• Work items completed
• Open defects in production, to give a high-level approximation of technical debt
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Metrics guide planning and estimation
• Over time, we would expect that the spread of cycle times for a given item size goes down.
• So, over time, an estimate of completion time for items of a given size should become more accurate.
• Work items can be sized by t-shirt sizes (smalls, mediums or larges) and the average cycle times for those sizes from the last release become the estimate for the upcoming release.
• Large items should in most cases be broken down into smaller items
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2010 R7 2010 R8 2011 R1 2011 R2 2011 R3 2011 R40
5
10
15
20
25
30
35Average Cycle Times for work items
Average of Cycle Time (small - 1 Story Point)
Average of Cycle Time (medium - 3 Story Points)
Average of Cycle Time (large - 5 Story Points)
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Kanban in practice
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Why Kanban?
• Shorter sprint lengths were forcing us to artificially break up items in order to fit within sprint boundaries.
• Sprint planning consumed the team for an entire day.
• Most of the work for a sprint was getting completed all at once, close to the end of the sprint.
• QA had nothing to do at the beginning of a sprint, but were overworked at the end.
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Mapping the Value Stream
• At the time, the Website team was really 2 teams, Engineering and Design.
• We asked the teams to map out their current development process.
• It was really complicated…
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Mapping the Value Stream
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One Team – Single Flow
Produce
Todo Item and task
type by color
WIPL = 6 full items
Bugs & Footprints on board
Visible policies
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Cumulative Flow Diagram
• QA overloaded
• Worked on more constant delivery
• Identified a bottleneck with source control
• Changed our branching strategy to improve
Before After
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Cumulative Flow Diagram
• By September, we’re now releasing twice a week to Production
• Much smoother CFD, continuous deliver improves cycle time
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One Year Later…
New classes of service
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Resources
• Kanban by David J Anderson
• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash - by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
• Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development - by Corey Ladas
• http://www.netobjectives.com/
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Conclusion
Thank you!