Kanban method: Example PNZ No. 2: Training and Courses

In my previous two articles, I showed how we can perceive the delivery process as a process of accumulating knowledge . When professionals do their job, a sequence of dominant activities creates knowledge. The original article contained an example of building a flowchart for the average Agile software delivery team. The following article gave an example of understanding how a lean startup performs its research confirmed by the client by testing hypotheses.

Our next example takes us to the world of instruction and courses. This is thanks to my colleague Travis, who runs the training department of a high-tech company. Travis’s department provides many services, but in this example we’ll only look at one of them: course development.

In the process of creating the course, Travis and his colleagues identified five dominant activities:

• fact finding
•  training project
•  compilation
•  beta testing
•  publication

Finding facts is a very collective activity. Travis mental workers collaborate with the research and development department, customer support, technical writers, and system engineers. As we saw in other examples of dominant activity, this initially creates a lot of knowledge, but ultimately begins to bring less and less impact and yields to the next.

The training project is formed mainly in the training department, but the technical documentation and sales units have the right to vote in its approval. Then development begins.

The compilation of the course material ultimately reaches the point where another type of activity is a more productive way of accumulating knowledge. Thus, this activity begins to dominate the process of accumulating knowledge. Beta testing brings together another group of employees, including marketers, field engineers, product line managers and, of course, actual beta users. Testing creates another level of knowledge and ultimately inferior to the ultimate type of activity - publication. It includes the creation of videos, prints, presentations, handouts, and so on.

From the previous examples of building diagrams of the process of accumulating knowledge, you can guess what to expect, but this time it is more loaded:

Further (although this will not be the next post in the continuation of this collection) we will consider the practical issues of creating such diagrams and their use to improve the delivery of the service.