Kanban is not your process
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Transcript of Kanban is not your process
(Let me tell you why)
Kanban is not your process
Torbjörn ”Tobbe” Gyllebring @drunkcod
Kanban hipsters beware!
”It’s nice seeing someone willing to act as counterbalance to the Kanban geeks”
- Name witheld, private communication
”We used to do ’X’, but now we do Kanban”
Perhaps the most pervasive missunderstanding in the community right now.
I used to drive to work, but now I pursue a healthy lifestyle
Interesting. Says little about how you get to work, semantically broken
What’s Kanban?
Some required context
Key distinctions
• The Kanban method
• The Kanban community
• kanban systems
The Kanban method
• Start with what you do know
• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
• Initially, respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & job titles
Kanban core practices
1) Visualize
2) Limit WIP
3) Manage flow
4) Make policies explicit
5) Improve collaborativly
Kanban is self-similar
• Personal Kanban
• Team level
• Project level
• Enterprise portfolio management
• ...
"doing Kanban means using a kanban system as part of a process to control muri [uneven flow], mura [overburdening]& stimulate evolutionary change”
– David J. Anderson
Kanban as your meta process
Guided improvement
Visualization
• Encourage shared understanding
Limit work in process
• Adds stress to the system
• Surfaces problems
"Is it really economical to provide more information than we need - more quickly than we need it?“
– Taiichi Ohno
Manage flow
• Aligns local improvements with system level goals
• Helps avoid sub optimization
Improve collaborativly
• Run experiments
• Measure results
• Standardize on real improvements
Make policies explicit
• Visualized decision process
• Makes tacit knowledge explict
• Liberates everyone to think in context
”Kanban is like getting a shrink for your process”
– Jan Olofsson
You can’t start with Kanban
The power & peril of naming things
”If you give it a name then managers will think it comes in a box”
– John Seddon (inventor of the Vanguard method)
Kanban & new teams
• Pick a process
• Overlay it with Kanban
Kanban & existing teams
• Start with what you do (k)now
• Make it explicit
• Design experiments to learn
Depth of implementation
• Just a splash of Kanban can go a long way
Kanban doesn’t care if you have lunch
What does Kanban say about ’X’
• Mostly diddly-squat
• The community has tons of experience to share though
But I find practice or role ’X’ really helpful!
• Coach
• Scrum Master
• Product Owner
• Test Lead
• Pair Programming
• Test Driven Development
• ...
I find having LUNCH really beneficial
What Kanban does say is ...
• Start with what you have, existing roles & workflow
• Improve collaborativly
Co-create experiments tailored to your context!
Discover improvements
• Support teams in finding & executing improvement initatives
• Avoid imposing policies on them
Kanban & evolution
Why evolution?
• Evolution is effective, but not particularly efficent
But isn’t efficiency important?
”There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”
– Peter Drucker
Orgel’s second rule
”Evolution is cleverer than you are.”
–Leslie Orgel (evolutionary biologist )
Return of the quality guru
”It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of a specific activity or method.”
–W. Edwards Deming
Complicated, but can you do complex?
”We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!”
– Donella Meadows
Kanban is process evolution
• You derserve a context specific solution
• Pull improvement from those best informed
• Assume you don’t understand the problem
• Be prepared to be surprised & delighted
Thanks!