Big Kanban (Scaling Kanban Style)

@KanbanDan#LLKD16 #ScalingKanbanStyle

Scaling Kanban Style
Big Kanban @KanbanDan #LLKD16 #ScalingKanbanStyle

• So we’re getting good at Team Kanban
• But (whisper it loudly), that’s only a Proto-Kanban
• The big benefits come when you do Kanban at
Scale
• But can we avoid a big transformation
for that?
What’s this all about then?

I want to tell you a story…

Meet Si
• Si is a Kanban guy
• Service Delivery Manager for team Alphanauts
• His team is going great guns and they’re started to get noticed
• Why can’t every team be like Alphanauts?
• Fast turnaround
• High commitment
• Predictable
• Calm
• Happy
• Everyone pulling in the same direction
Photo credit Roo Reynolds & Leila Johnston

Si is going to have to share
• He’s been asked to scale his method, but…
• Si ‘knows’ that agile only works at scale with
• Cross functional teams
• And colocation
• Doesn’t it?
• DanCorp just isn’t like that
• Globally distributed teams
• Alphanauts are all in the UK, of course everyone else looks bad
• It has to be down to the co-location thing, hasn’t it?
• Or perhaps not

Interconnected Ecosystem of Shared Services
• Many agilists subscribe to the school of cross-functional teams
• But when the organisation has spent all of those years building
the opposite, how could Si change everything?
• The problem he knew was Kaizen Vs Kaikaku
• Moving to cross-functional teams was a revolution
not evolution
• Instead Si decided to:
• leave the teams where they were
• help the organisation to manage the flow of value
through the whole ecosystem
http://www.mroconnection.com/

Si’s going to have to “Kanban the $h!t out of it”
© Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

The team of teams
• No team can do anything of value to the company on their own
• Just like no individual in Alphanauts could do anything on their
own. The team was the unit of delivery for user stories
• The whole organisation was the unit of delivery for user features.
• But each team worked wholly independently of each other team,
• No-one was aligned in DanCorp. Oh no!

Misaligned organisation
Everyone is optimised for local
efficiency & local benefit

Si needed to create an aligned organisation
Everyone is optimised towards
organisation wide benefit
Everyone is playing the same
game with the same goals

Enter the Service Delivery Manager
• Si’s new role was in effect the Service Delivery Manager for the
entire end to end value flow rather than just Alphanauts
• Si suspected that by bringing together the teams to work on the
right thing at the right time, Si could make DanCorp deliver
Service like it never had before.
• Everyone in DanCorp could ‘win’ together rather than just
burning calories to make heat!
• But what should we work on? Who gets to decide? Hmmm.

© Brilliant TV Ltd
Service Request Manager
• When Si only had to worry about Alphanauts,
he convinced his product owner Tim to focus
more on the policies for risk assessment, scheduling,
sequencing and selection.
• Tim became a Service Request Manager
• Surely someone must care about those things across DanCorp?
• Tim suggested Si talk to his boss Trevor...

• Trevor loved the idea of aligning DanCorp around service
delivery and volunteered to help as the SRM
• Trevor and Si worked together to
reposition existing meetings with
stakeholders and teams to focus on
• Strategy
• Operations
• Service Delivery
• Operations
• Delivery Planning
• Replenishment of work queues
Game on

Subtle Changes, obvious benefits
• The approach wasn’t revolutionary, but the effects were
• Instead of each team being isolated from the common
goals, Trevor and Si helped them line up.
• Each team started replenishing their own queues
aligned with everyone else
• Instead of focusing on local benefit and targets, everyone could
see how they helped overall service delivery
• Everyone still did the same work, but now they seemed to be
pulling together rather than in separate directions.
http://mokyn.com/sb/info.html

Was it all Roses and Daffodils?
• Yes. This is a story, not a case study
• Duration of work from end to end dropped dramatically
• Value delivery rate increased
• Defects dropped due to the focus on quality at every stage
• Motivation grew because everyone shared common purpose
• See Dan Pink’s book Drive to learn more about that
• Company performance improved and DanCorp dominated its
sector for years to come….

But could it be real?
• Why not?
• What’s stopping us?
• What would we have to change to get there?

What do you need to change?
• You need to make someone responsible for the end to end
delivery of value
• Like Si
• You need to make someone responsible for facilitating the risk
assessment, sequencing, scheduling and selection of work
• Like Trevor
• Change the focus of some existing meetings
• Change policies to allow the focus on organisational goals
instead of local targets.
• Measures to see the improvements – Execs want to win!

What wouldn’t have to change
• Where people work
• The organisation structure
• 95% of Job titles, roles, responsibilities,
skills of the people in the organisation
• Offices, departments pay scales…
• The changes are subtle and easy to implement without
a complete re-org
• Kanban truly is an alternative path to agility.

Say NO to Transformation
Join the Kanban Evolution instead

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Big Kanban (Scaling Kanban Style)

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