📞 🍰 🏓 Kanban Method Perception Evolution 🍬 🚍 🤬

Hi friends!

I’m with you Denis Bartolome, Head of Project Development at Rosbank. Today I will talk about the evolution of the perception of the Kanban method.

For three years of counseling and coaching, for different people who decide to "start working on the Kanban," I observed the same "stages" of changing the perception of knowledge, through the prism of which they chose one or another part of the toolkit. In the article, I briefly structured my observations, and I hope that this review will help you a little deeper to understand the full power of modern Kanban.

If interested, welcome to cat.

Alternative way to Agile

Most people in the post-Soviet space who begin their acquaintance with the Kanban method perceive it exclusively in the context of Agile practices. Whether this is good or bad is a debatable issue, let us leave this as a fact.

In many ways, this perception can be explained by the work of marketers who translated the book by David Anderson (the author of the method), which in the original is called “Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business”, like “Kanban. An alternative way to Agile. "

Although, universal consultants who offer “turnkey Agile”, where they represent Kanban as a “framework alternative to Scrum,” added fuel to the fire.

LEAN Framework with WIP Limits

Yes Yes. Universal consultants often dwell on this perception of the method - Kanban as a framework: a set of specific rules that builds a stream of tasks. This perception also arises from the request of customers who, too, without diving into the topic, want a “framework”. Moreover, in the context of Agile practices, the application of Scrum is before your eyes.

And then everyone is surprised at the large number of failures of such "implementations."

Toolbox Manager

Anyone who has not yet abandoned the topic at one of the previous two stages and decided to dive into it a little more, begins to realize that the Kanban method is a huge box with tools that can solve problems in the process of value delivery.

This toolkit includes:

Set of values
Set of principles
Set of practices
STATIK - a structured workshop for phased visualization of the current process
The Kanban Maturity Model is a model that helps tailor values, practices, and principles to a specific situation to trigger a guided evolution of the service

Custom recognizable work item

It all starts with a reflection on “Who are we?” Who are our customers? How we are working?". And after visualizing their process, people begin to understand that they do not “write code”, but “provide” that they have consumers, users, and that the service does not end with successful compilation of the software module, but it still needs to be tested, installed , introduce, teach.

As a result, tasks appear in the process that people actually work with, and not pieces of decomposed elements that in themselves do not carry values.

Team building tool

Kanban professionals do not like the word team. They live in a service paradigm - any activity can be represented as services, and a team is just one way of organizing. However, when working with people, I noticed that working with the visualization board — holding Kanban meetings, focusing on the common task, and not on your piece, developing rules — all this helps people change their behavior.

People begin to behave as a whole - as a team. Naturally, this does not happen right away, the team storms at the beginning of the path, but, developing its own rules of work, visualizing them, the Kanban method smoothly normalizes the performance of the service.

Early warning system

The next stage of understanding the method begins after the service has been working with the flow of tasks for some time. For those who use Kanban, previously fluctuations of the flow that are hidden before are obvious - blocked work, internal queues, focus shift to some particular stage, and not to the entire service. All these distortions become visible immediately, as soon as the tasks get into the system, and complex, but necessary conversations begin to happen earlier, until everything is lost.

Three-dimensional Prioritization Model

A separate mention is the moment when people were able to understand the beauty of prioritization that the Kanban method offers - a symbiosis of three components that affect the priority of a task:

Customer Priority
Service classes
Focus on completing tasks, as opposed to starting new ones

The combined perception of these three dimensions turns the Kanban board into a prioritization system, where the place of the task card on the board determines its priority for the service.

3D priorities are not the easiest thing to take, but not the hardest. When people realize how it works, they have a wow effect “what could it be like that?” The most difficult thing is to realize before that the columns near the board are not stages of the process, but stages of knowledge accumulation. And the fact that if you move the task along the board backward - you lower its priority, and not return to the previous stage.

What's next?

Using Kanban at the local level, people are imbued with the full power of the method and they have a desire to try this tool on more complex and ambitious tasks. And here the Kanban method acts as an assistant in building the "End-to-End" processes. And then - for portfolio management, and for managing strategic initiatives.

Thus, Kanban is not just an alternative way to Agile, but a powerful process management method that is often underestimated or incorrectly evaluated.

If during reading you find yourself at some of the intermediate stages - do not give up Kanban, let it show you.

Kanban Method Perception Evolution