Kanban experiences at Volvo IT - Anders Jonsson, LTG-4

Kanban@Volvo IT

Program X
Global solution for all Volvo BA/BU’s
Program (Volvo IT part):
Scaled from 25 to 50 persons and included a new site (Gothenburg, Wroclaw and Brazil)
Multiple releases (several releases / year)
Multiple functional patches (several / year)
Multiple stakeholders
Multiple projects (7) and Maintenance@once
.NET technology

Background – why Kanban
Volvo IT must meet the challenge to increase the delivery capacity from Volvo IT regarding future and increased workload at Volvo XX, dept. XYZ and also resolve how to handle multiple releases from multiple stakeholders.
We needed something that could scale beyond our current way of working (Scrum)

Approach
We (Åsa Zetterlund, Petra Hallin and I) attended Kanban training given by David Anderson
Trained the entire team (~45-50 persons) onsite
Walkthrough of Kanban concepts
Played the getKanban Board Game, www.getkanban.com
Created the and redefined the board
Spent a lot of time defining the process
Policies
Roles and feature teams
Meetings structure

Visual board (initial version) Project ABC Project YYY Project XYZ Analysis FDCG queue Ready for IT WIP [xx] In prog Done Expediters IT Dev Analysis WIP [xx] Build Queue Development WIP [xx] In prog In prog Done Done Test WIP [xx] Package & deploy Live Maintenance

Kanban board

Lessons learned
The team learned Kanban really fast
Knowledge sharing in the feature teams was good
Distribution of knowledge
Work progressed, in general, in a good way in the feature teams
Maintenance and Kanban worked really well together from day one (blends perfectly)
Kanban gave us a very good overview of the work across projects etc (easier to maintain several teams this way)
Productivity goals was reached in large
Scrum and Kanban works really well together (you need to use the good parts in both tool kits)
Capacity planning became really easy and visible

Lessons learned cont.
Hard to get daily meetings to work properly
We focused a lot on the board content (dev process, policies etc) => didn’t have time or energy to improve our Kanban setup as soon as we would have liked
Don’t do Excel for 50 persons (it doesn’t scale though it’s a great tool)!
Traditional PM and Kanban doesn’t blend easily
You still need Scrum Masters (Kanban masters) and also a board owner when doing “program Kanban” (several projects etc)
You WILL NOT get it right the first time (this is a 100% guarantee) so GET GOING. But… it takes more time than anticipated to get the process in place and everyone to understand it so be prepared to spend some initial time and also to change it several times
Start with the existing process and make it visible

Kanban is like water
” It goes around the rock and g iven time it molds the rock”
Quote:David Anderson, Vienna 6 th of December 2011

Kanban experiences at Volvo IT - Anders Jonsson, LTG-4

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