10 years of kanban - what have we learned

dja@djaa.com, @djaa_dja
10 Years of Kanban
What have we Learned?
It’s antifragile too!
It’s great for service
delivery!
Presenter
David J. Anderson
LeanKanban UK
November 2014

2004-2006 Microsoft XIT Sustaining Eng.
Deferred commitment pull
system coupled to probabilistic
understanding of lead time
• Improved productivity
over 200%
• Greatly improved
predictability
• Shortened lead times by
~90%
Use of Kanban systems is
minimally intrusive for
engineers. Process
methodologies didn’t change
• PSP/TSP remained in
use throughout

Conclusion
Kanban is good for
service delivery

2006 Validating Evidence
Eric Landes at Robert Bosch
copies XIT solution for intranet
maintenance and produces similar
results
HP Printer Firmware
Division, Boise, Idaho,
implements a kanban system
as part of a Lean initiative
and attributes 400% of an
800% productivity
improvement to kanban.
Lead times fall from 21
months to 3.5 months

Conclusion
Kanban and its results
are repeatable

2007 Kanban Method Emerges
Kanban systems aren’t enough
when there is too much
variability in the workflow and
too much heterogeneity of work
types and trouble matching
worker skills & experience
• Now known as a system
liquidity problem
• Visual boards are
introduced
• Kanban limits create
stress & provoke process
improvements
• Multiple classes of service
emerge

2007 Kanban Method Matures
A combination of elements of
Kanban such as system
replenishment, classes of service,
understanding cost of delay,
transparency and metrics start
to change entire company culture Operations review drives BU
wide improvements and
starts to influence other BUs
within the firm

Conclusion
The Kanban Method is a
management system for
cultural change &
improving organizational
maturity

2007 First Kanban Software
Digital Whiteboard application
developed by Darren Davis at
Corbis runs on top Microsoft
Team Foundation Server
Workers run Digital Whiteboard
on their desktop but continue to
use physical boards in parallel

Conclusion
We need software to get
good metrics easily and
amplify the management
value of Kanban

2007 Kanban on Big Projects
$11 million budget project with
up to 55 people, 16 month
schedule, approximately 2400
user story scope
2-tiered kanban boards
emerge to visualize parent-child
dependencies in
Introdureceqsu ihryembreidn tosf dedicated
teams and floating project
personnel using avatars
• Specialists such as
architects, UX
• Generalists who can help
any team

Conclusion
Kanban is useful on large
projects to improve
predictability.
More guidance on
prioritizing backlogs is
required at large scale.

Agile 2007 Conference
Kanban presented in the CwaC
open space with 25 attendees.
Online community starts with
Yahoo! group kanbandev Early adopters of Kanban are
teams struggling with Scrum
at Yahoo! coached by Karl
Scotland, Joe Arnold &
Aaron Sanders in UK, India
& San Jose

2008 Personal Kanban Adaptation
If this is so good for our service
delivery shouldn’t we be using it
help us be more organized and get
things done at a personal level? Personal Kanban emerges as
a concept
• At Modus Cooperandi
offices in Seattle
• Elsewhere at firms
such as IPC in London

2008 Scrumban
Corey Ladas coins the term
“Scrumban” to describe
organizations currently using
Scrum who apply Kanban to evolve
to uniquely tailored process
solutions such as those at Yahoo!
In 2014, most people still
don’t get this!
• Scrumban isn’t a
process. It is a journey
(or story) of
organizations embracing
evolutionary change and
evolving away from
canonical Scrum
It’s not Scrum or Kanban
• But, Scrum+Kanban ->
Uniquely tailored
unbranded process

2008 Early Adopters Emerge
Media, Internet & SaaS firms
suffer from acute, self-evident cost
of delay and ‘tyranny of the
timebox’ challenges. Kanban
address these issues for them
 BBC and IPC Media in London
 NBC Universal in LA & New York
 Motley Fool in Washington DC
area
 Constant Contact (Boston) &
Ultimate (Ft. Lauderdale), both
SaaS firms
Media, Internet, SaaS firms
are primary early adopters

2008 – Decision Filters for Leaders
 Agile Decision Filter
• Make progress with imperfect
information
• Encourage a high trust culture
• Treat WIP as a liability rather than an
asset
 Lean Decision Filter
• Value trumps flow
• Flow trumps waste elimination
• Eliminate waste to improve efficiency,
do not pursue economies of scale

2009 Lean Kanban Conference
First community conference held in
Miami. Only 58 attendees.
Sponsored by Ultimate Software
(who will continue to support us
for the next 6 years)
Full day, single track of
Kanban content includes case
studies from
• Motley Fool
• SEP
• Inkubook / Authorhouse
• Phidelis
• Yahoo!

2009 Definition of Kanban Method
 Principles
Recognizing that kanban systems
were part of a wider management
system, the whole system is named
for the use of kanban systems
• Start with what you do now
• Agree to pursue evolutionary change
• Initially, respect existing roles,
responsibilities & job titles
 Practices
• Visualize, Limit WIP
• Manage Flow, Make Policies Explicit
• Implement Feedback Loops
• Improve collaboratively, evolve
The Kanban Method is
positioned as an approach to
evolutionary improvement
experimentally

2009 “Be Like Water”
http://joecampbell.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/be-like-water/
Joe Campbell’s blog post inspires
step 1 of the Ladder of Escalating
Motivation for Change, and our
primary strategy for resistance to
change which is to avoid it This will lead to the comparison
of Kanban with Bruce Lee’s
journey with Jeet June Do, and
the development of Fitness for
Purpose and the concept of an
adaptive anti-fragile enterprise

2009 Cost of Delay
• Beginning to understand Cost
of Delay as a qualitative
taxonomy
• Introduction of sketches of cost
of delay function shapes at
Posit Science in San Francisco Better understanding of classes
of service emerges, including
archetype set of 4 with names:
Expedite, Fixed Date, Standard,
Intangible

2009 More Validating Evidence
First case emerges which
replicates the cultural effects
observed in 2007 at Corbis
• IPC Media, London (Rob
Hathaway, Indigo Blue)
First real evidence that the
Kanban Method is a repeatable
and predictable system of
management

2009 Commercial Software
Entrepreneurs introduce
commercial Kanban software
products. Initial products come
from fans who’ve followed the
journey for years
Leankit Kanban from Nashville,
Tenessee
Tools for Agile, Silver Catalyst,
Pune, India

2009 Risk Assessment
Qualitative risk assessment
methods introduced to provide
“prioritization” for large projects
and service delivery where cost of
delay isn’t the most significant
risk factor
Generalized definition of classes of
service to include multiple risk
dimensions
“A class of service is a set of
policies that describe how an
item should be treated based
on its risk”

2009 Where to Start Guidance
 Enterprise scale Kanban
adoption: where do you start?
• Must be highly visible
• Must not be mission critical
• Must be
1) in so much pain, no one cares what
you try,
2) management keen to “go Lean”,
3) management wish to shift risk
up/down value stream

2009 Real Options
Deferred commitment with
kanban systems and concepts of
Real Options from Chris Matts,
Olav Maasen and others begin to
converge
• Chris Matts puts some definition
around Staff Liquidity concept
• Staff Liquidity presented at USC
CSSE Research Review

2009 “Tyranny of the Timebox”
“Tyranny of the Timebox”
concept emerges at Agile 2009
after Arlo Belshee/Jim Shore
explain the discontinuity from
discrete processes (timeboxes) to
continuous processes (kanban
systems)
• Simply making timeboxes
smaller to improve agility would
never lead you to adopt Kanban.
• Kanban was a discontinuous and
non-obvious innovation in the
Agile community

2009 Portfolio Kanban
First Portfolio Kanban example
presented at Agile 2009
• There is no WIP limit at the
portfolio level
• Limit WIP on projects, MMFs or
MVPs doesn’t make sense

2010 – Kanban “blue book”

2010 Brickell Key Awards
 BBC recognized as first large
scale adopter of Kanban
replicating the viral spread seen
at Corbis but on a much larger
scale
 David Joyce of the BBC
recognized together with
Alisson Vale of Phidelis as first
winners of the Brickell Key Award
 Best Kanban implementations
are in UK & Brazil

2010 - STATIK
Recognizing the need to teach
people how to get started with
Kanban, training classes adopt
the use of the STATIK exercises
STATIK = the Systems Thinking
Approach To Implementing Kanban
• the method is presented at
conference in 2012
• the acronym will not be
introduced until 2013

2010 High Maturity Organizations
Kanban is recognized as a method
that encourages adoption of
higher maturity quantitative
methods
Kanban is also recognized as a key
part of accelerated organizational
maturity improvement
• Published case studies
talking decsribe CMMI
ML1-ML2 in 3 months,
ML2-ML3 in 9 months,
ML3-ML5 in 9 months
• These timescales are “off
the scale” compared to
typical timescales for CMMI
adoption

2010 Upstream Kanban
Initially in Belgium and France
Upstream Kanban will evolve into
Discovery Kanban lead by Patrick
Staeyert and his client Nemetschek
Skia. Case study will be published
in 2013

2010 Proto-Kanban
First recognized in the Posit
Science case study in 2009, pre-kanban
system implementations
without a full pull system are
recognized as an important part
of the coaching toolbox
Richard Turner of the Stevens
Institute coins the term “proto-
Kanban” to describe these pre-pull
system implementations that
eventually evolve into full Kanban
3 Types of Proto-Kanban are
eventually recognized
• Aggregated personal
kanban
• Aggregated team kanban
• Per-person WIP limits

2010 IT Operations
 IT Ops people begin appearing in
classes
 They want to design aggregated
personal kanban boards
• Specialist workers often dedicated to
single work-item type
• Refactor to lanes for types, multi-skilled
workers with avatars
 Demand analysis & capacity
allocation become even more
important
• Especially for unplanned, irrefutable
work (push)

2010 Break out from IT Sector
Stories of Kanban in
HR/Recruitment, Sales, and other
functions emerge
Medium-sized owner-managed
firms begin to adopt Kanban
enterprise wide
• e.g. Huddle Group,
Argentina
In 2011 stories of legal firms using
Kanban for case files emerged in
UK and New Zealand

2011 Personal Kanban published
Wins a Shingo Prize!

2011 Large Scale Enterprise Adoption
Business unit wide
adoption begins to
emerge at firms
such as
• Petrobras
• McKesson
• Vanguard
• Amdocs

Appropriateness
An understanding emerges for
appropriate conditions for
adoption, including…
• System dynamics (or
mechanics)
• Cultural, organizational,
social, psychological
factors
• Complexity factors

2011 Lean Kanban University established
Accredited Kanban Trainer
program inaugurated with 16
founding member companies and
over 20 AKTs
• Standardized “practitioner”
curriculum published
edu.leankanban.com

2012 Data Analysis
Community starts reporting data
analysis on lead time distributions
showing tails that are 5x to 10x
greater than the mean
Flow efficiency metric comes back
into fashion as it is evident that
size, complexity or skills/experience
of workers don’t correlate to lead
times
• Increased focus on sources of
delay: queues, blocking issues,
dependencies

2012 Optimal Exercise Point
By understanding the cost of
delay and the lead time
distribution we can make a risk-based
assessment of the best time
to start something
If we can’t start at the optimal
time we can understand whether
to start an item earlier or later
based on the nature of the cost of
delay, or decide to discard the
option

2012 Kanban Kata
Hakan Forss points out similarity
to Kanban feedback loopsand
Rother’s Toyota Kata Service Delivery Reviews (SDRs)
become a formal part of the
method. These are also known as
System Capability Review but this
name was dropped as being too
internally focused

2012 Depth of Kanban Assessment
Hakan Forss challenges the idea
that deep Kanban emerges
linearly from visualization to
experimental improvement as
practices are added
A multi-dimensional model of
depth of Kanban assessment
emerges in both an absolute
practice-based form and a relative
assessment form. In 2014, it is
updated to take more a values-based,
observed outcome form

2012 Little’s Flaw
Dan Vacanti and Frank Vega’s
work on the origins of Little’s
Law in queuing theory and
understanding from Savavge &
Danzinger’s The Flaw of Averages
shows us why it’s an appropriate
tool for understanding flow in
creative work
Dimitar Bakardzhiev helps us
understand why consistency of
system performance allows us to
use it as a forecasting tool.
Understanding consistency of
system performance becomes vital
to reliable Little’s Law based
forecasting & capacity allocation

2012 Kanban System Liquidity
Kanban system liquidity can be
measured as the volume of pull
transactions in the system and
the laminar/turbulent nature of
flow understood from its
derivative.
We don’t get it quite right in
2012 but watch out for liquidity
becoming a core metric in
forecasting tools in 2015
System Liquidity meets
Reinertsen’s criteria for a good
metric
• Simple
• Self-generating
• Relevant
• Leading Indicator
And it is a global metric which
isn’t subject to local optimization

2012 Lessons in Agile Management
The heavily under-rated book
that underpins the Kanban
Coaching Masterclass and most
of the theory behind the
Kanban Method

2012 Crossing the Chasm Kanban
 Compelling reason to buy
• Senior people
 make promises I can keep
 Improved governance
• Middle managers
 Up-manage with confidence – answer the
hard questions
 Down-manage with confidence – make
the hard decisions
• Individual contributors/Line managers
 Relief from abusive environment (over-burdening)

2012 Cost of Delay Updates
Still using sketches including
the market payoff function
and understanding its
sensitivity to time
Qualitative Cost of Delay
assessment now has 3 dimensions
• Function shape
• Order of magnitude in size
• Shelf-life

2013 Statistics & Simulation
Lead time histograms
observed to be Weibull
distributions
Monte Carlo simulation introduced
as an optional feature in leading
Kanban software products
Troy Magennis wins Brickell Key
Award for this work

2013 – Kanban Agendas
 Survivability
• Resilience/anti-fragility
• Evolutionary capability
 Service-orientation
• Fitness criteria metrics
• Workflow
• service level expectations
 Sustainability
• Relief from over-burdening

2013 Fitness for Purpose
Service-orientation
allows us to ask what
makes a service “fit for
purpose”
Fitness criteria are metrics that
measure things customers value
when selecting a service again &
again
• Delivery time
• Quality
• Predictability
• Safety (or conformance to
regulatory requirements)

2013 Kanban Lens
Learn to view what you do now as a set
of services (that can be improved):
• What to look for…
 Creative work is service-oriented
 Service delivery involves workflow
 Workflow involves a series of
knowledge discovery activities
• What to do…
 Map the knowledge discovery
workflow
 Pay attention to how & why work
arrives
 Track work flowing through the service

2013 Kanban Values
Transparency Balance Collaboration
Customer
Focus
Flow Leadership
Understanding Agreement Respect

2014 Kanban from the Inside

2013 Scale-free understanding
Eliminating unbounded queues
• Proto-kanban to full
workflow kanban
• Coupling interdependent
network of kanban
systems
Andy Carmichael’s Smallest Possible
Definition of Kanban
See Flow,
Start Here,
With visible work & policies,
validate improvements
Core practices renamed
“general practices” with specific
practices at different scales
• Personal/team Kanban
• Service Delivery /
Workflow Kanban
• Portfolio Kanban

2014 Kanban Litmus Test
1. Have managers changed their
behavior?
2. Has the customer interface
changed?
3. Has the customer contract
changed?
4. Has the service delivery business
model changed?
If you can’t answer yes to at least 2 of
these questions you aren’t doing
Kanban yet!

2014 Risk Review
Risk Review is added as
a feedback loop to the
Kanban Method
Klaus Leopold pioneered the
process of harvesting & custering
blocker tickets.
He goes on to experiment with
other ways of visualizing &
harvesting delay data

2014 Fitness for Purpose Review
Review customer stories
Review Fitness criteria
• Do they map to existing
clusters?
• Do we perceive customers of a
• Or, do we see emerging new
Regular recurring meeting
with front-line staff
• Perhaps performed at different
given cluster/segment are happy
and consider us “fit for purpose”
organizational levels to roll-up
information in larger scale
organizations
clusters?
• What services or product features
or service delivery expectations
have emerged or changed?

2014 What we now know!
 Kanban systems are applicable for
almost any creative or knowledge
work service delivery workflow
 The Kanban Method is appropriate
wherever an evolutionary approach
to change is desirable
 Kanban works in low and high
maturity organizations but basic
maturity or converged workflow
steps are required to model and
implement a kanban system

 Use of Kanban consistently shows
200-800% productivity gains and
50-90% lead time improvements
where a baseline is available
 Personal Kanban is a “gateway
drug” to introduce Kanban in the
office
 Personal Kanban in the office is
known as Team Kanban and is a
form of Proto-Kanban
 Getting beyond Proto-Kanban is
challenging!!!

 Kanban represents about 3% of
the Agile market by revenue.
 Shallow/Proto-Kanban is widely
adopted but represents no
market value
• Physical boards
• Little or no training or consulting
 Kanban is more readily adopted
by non-IT people who have no
“methodology baggage”

Modern Management Framework
All of this knowledge is more
than just kanban systems or
what we ever dreamed of as
Kanban
Hence, we packaged it all up as the
• Emphasize that Kanban is a
management system and not
a process
• A framework because it is
continually extending as we
learn more

The Modern Management
Framework is applicable to
all creative services and
knowledge worker service
industries To be flippant…
• “Kanban should be bigger
than Agile!”
• Not measured as part of the
Agile market at all

We need tools!
 Existing Kanban software products
largely seek to replicate the
function of a physical board
 They don’t actually help with real
management problems
 Most of the Modern Management
Framework is easy to understand
but laborious to implement
• No one build a Gantt chart manually!
 Without proper tooling adoption will
be slow

A vision from 2003
In 2003, I described my
work with Feature-driven
Development (FDD) & Agile
Management as “like MRP
for Knowledge Work”
Instead Don Reinertsen said, “you
have all the pieces in place to adopt
the use of kanban systems”

Kanban to MRP
 1947 Kanban in manufacturing –
Taiichi Ohno
• Term “kanban” not adopted until
1964
 1964 Manufacturing
Requirements Planning – Joseph
Orlicky
• Book published in 1975
 Kanban to MRP 17 years

A vision for 2015
We now have all the pieces in place to
start managing modern business where
employees “think for a living” and make
decisions – knowledge worker businesses
– and managing them with the rigor,
anticipation and risk awareness that I
envisaged in 2003
I now call this future vision
Enterprise Services Planning (ESP)

Kanban to ESP
 2004 Kanban in knowledge work
(IT services) introduction at
Microsoft, Dragos Dumitriu & David
J. Anderson
• Book published in 2010
 2015 Enterprise Services Planning
• A new class of software tools which
implement the Modern Management
Framework
• Book published ????
 Kanban to ESP 11 years?

ESP – Anticipating Demand, Allocating
Combine the two, and across the
organization you smooth flow
Capacity
Demand
Observed
Capability
Demand
end-to-end and help keep
demand in balance with
overall system capability
Demand
Observed
Capability
Observed
Capability
Looking downstream, you want the
system to help you anticipate and
mLoaonkaigneg dueppsetnredaemnc,i eysou want the
system to help you anticipate and
manage demand

Enterprise Services Planning
“The Future of Kanban”
 “Fit for Purpose” service delivery
• Fitness criteria metrics & classes of service
tuned to market segments / source of
customer demand
 Anticipate Demand
• Comprehend WIP limits, staffing levels and
required liquidity levels
 Shape Demand
• Allocate capacity based on risk strategy
and market or business objectives
 Intelligent Human Capital
Development
• Determine real ROI for skills & experience
investment

Thank you!

About
David Anderson is an innovator in
the management of 21st Century
businesses that employ creative
people who “think for a living” . He
leads a training, consulting,
publishing and event planning
business dedicated to developing,
promoting and implementing new
management thinking & methods…
He has 30 years experience in the high technology industry
starting with computer games in the early 1980’s. He has led
software organizations delivering superior productivity and
quality using innovative methods at large companies such as
Sprint and Motorola.
David defined the Modern Management Framework and
originated the Kanban Method an adaptive approach to
improved service delivery. His latest book, published in 2012,
is, Lessons in Agile Management – On the Road to Kanban.
David is MD of David J. Anderson & Associates Ltd., a
consulting and training firm operating globally offering
management training solutions for 21st Century businesses
whose employees make performance defining decisions daily.

Acknowledgements
Kanban has been a community effort from scores of people some of
whom are mentioned explicitly in this presentation others too
numerous to mention here have been given credit along the way.
However, none of this would have been possible were it not for the
dedication, passion and energy of Janice Linden-Reed who has worked
tirelessly to build the community since 2009. She is a founder of the
Limited WIP Society and recipient of the Honorary Brickell Key Award
for community contribution.

David J Anderson
& Associates, Ltd.

Told you!
Antifragile!
I can’t believe he
didn’t mention
Cynefin!

10 years of kanban - what have we learned

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Was ist angesagt?

Was ist angesagt? (20)

Andere mochten auch

Andere mochten auch (20)

Ähnlich wie 10 years of kanban - what have we learned

Ähnlich wie 10 years of kanban - what have we learned (20)

Mehr von David Anderson

Mehr von David Anderson (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (18)

10 years of kanban - what have we learned