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Kanban India 2023 | Ashwinee Singh and Masa Maeda | A Kanban-centric Ecosystemic Enterprise Transformation
- 1. www.kanbanindia.org A Kanban-Centric Approach to Ecosystemic Enterprise Transformation Ashwinee Singh & Masa K. Maeda & UST Business Agility Practice
- 2. www.kanbanindia.org UST One of the largest 4 Telecoms globally
- 4. www.kanbanindia.org Assessments laying down Transformation approach
- 5. www.kanbanindia.org Ecosystemic approach of Transformation There must be mutual benefit among all the components of the organization at all times
- 7. www.kanbanindia.org 2) Strong mix of project maintenance and new project development 3) Kanban works great for new development and has higher flexibility of cadences, which speeds up value creation and delivery with flow over sprints 4) The Kanban method practices makes it easier to mature practice more rapidly than with Scrum Why Kanban was chosen over Scrum? 5) Flow based development results in more flexible delivery compared to sprints 6) Starting without disruption and allowing disruption to emerge virtually eliminates resistance to change since change comes from within 7) The higher visibility of Kanban systems makes it easier to bring leadership in with the mindset desired 1) Ecosystemic approach to allow flow and common way of work across all the organizations involved (technical and non-technical) for seamless alignment and communication
- 8. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory 1. We started with Mindset-oriented practical workshops • Ecosystems-Systems-Lean-Agile (everybody) • Servant leadership (leaders only) 2. Followed by Collaboration Framework workshops • E.g., Empathy map, Sailboat, Starfish, etc. 3. Thereafter started Kanban workshops and simulators By doing this we: • Established a minimum bar across the entire organization from leaders to team members • Achieved initial minimum level of alignment across all involved • Developed better rapport, collaboration, and trust • Opened the doors to Servant Leadership • Established the importance of quantitative management
- 9. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory continued… • Created the core Value Stream Map • Created the Portfolio Kanban board • Covered the full value stream • One sticky on the board = one project • One Swim Lane = one area of the department • This board had over 150 projects with over 40 Project Managers involved • On day one of execution close to 50 projects were identified as Blocked • When we started, the daily standup meetings were taking close to one hour with all the PMs attending
- 10. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory continued… • All projects had more than one team involved • At first the boards for all teams looked exactly the same
- 11. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory continued… • As the teams executed and Kanban was applied, the boards evolved, and no two boards looked the same by the end of week 3.
- 12. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory continued… • Week 3 • Week 6
- 13. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory continued… Personal Kanban
- 14. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory continued… Portfolio Kanban Day-1 After 3 months
- 15. www.kanbanindia.org Let’s follow one project’s trajectory continued… The human element
- 23. www.kanbanindia.org Conclusion • The transformation done better with a broad scope that included many departments of org • The approach was to apply Mindset, Tools, Techniques, Methods, and Frameworks • Particular attention was paid to the human element, to benefit all the parts, and to improve the economic outcome • Kanban made it all easier to achieve Key Challenges • Measurement department refused to adopt • Working with physical vs digital Kanban tool for months • Quantification was very difficult as it needed significant manual efforts • Coaches keeping up with the speed of scalability • Unexpected challenges from some corporate functions
Editor's Notes
- - The story begins with the Information Systems Department of one of the four largest telecoms in the planet calling us to ask for a quote on Scrum training. - We asked why they want to do Scrum. To which they replied with the typical answer “everybody is doing it because it is great”. - We repeated the question, which resulted in an uncomfortable long silence… - We, then, restated the question: “what specifically have you identified as an organization such that you concluded that Scrum is the way to go?” - To which they replied that they really didn’t know. - We then said, “how about we help you find out.” - “how can you do that?”– they asked. - “Let’s conduct an assessment” – we replied.
- - The assessment was conducted 100% remote. The client in South America, and the assessment team working from the USA West Coast and from Europe. - We loaded a triad of collaboration frameworks that Masa developed (The Lighthouse, Tug of War, and Two Toppings) on Luke Hohmann’s collaboration platform (now part of the Scaled Agile tools suite) to assess about 80 people that included directors, managers, and team members. - Lighthouse is to identify the state of the organization (how good or how bad the situation is on diverse areas and aspects of those areas) - Tug of War is to understand positive and negative impacts along the entire value stream being considered - Two Toppings is to gather insights on what each participant considers to be the two most important aspects to tackle to bring the organization to world-class level - This slide shows an example of these three. The assessment was conducted in groups of six people per framework triad
- - The assessment was comprehensive, as it can be seen on the slide. In addition to the resulting radar charts, we developed a relationship map to better understand the ecosystem The orange dotted lines indicated relationships. The more arrows point to a given node, the more relevant it is. And those are where the first steps of transformation were taken. This was very useful to shape up the strategy and then continuously throughout the execution. - The conclusion of the assessment was that they needed was a Kanban-centric ecosystemic transformation, instead of series of Scrum courses.
- - Purple parts are predominantly soft skills (not exclusively) - Green parts are predominantly hard skills (not exclusively) -The polygons are to provide visual clue on how much each aspect is applied at what level - This is Kanban centric because the combination of Kanban method, STATIK, Kanban at scale came into play (even though the latter two didn’t formally exist at that time) were key to make the soft skills part easier to apply provided that with Kanban we created a tangible supporting structure. Meaning, for example, that a portfolio or a project Kanban system, together with their metrics, helped as conversation starters to apply mindset and servant leadership. - Decision makers were very impressed with the degree of depth, detail, and discovery of the assessment and of the proposal that they gave us the contract
- - Even though the contracted scope was the Information Systems department, we suggested them to bring 2 decision makers from each of the departments (Directors and managers) with which they interact the most and one decision maker from their providers during the first three days of engagement, which would be dedicated to mindset. This invitation was free of charge. - All people invited showed up. - In the first two days we covered Ecosystems and systems thinking at high level, and the economic benefits of agility. All in the form of a workshop (50% delivery, 50% hands on exercises). By the end of that second day all the decision makers, without exception, said they wanted this for their departments as well. One of the three providers also showed interest. - As we continued with the mindset days, we renewed the contract to increase the scope as per the other departments interests. - The mindset sessions got into a bit deeper detail and included Lean Thinking, Agile Thinking, and Servant Leadership. Further depth would take place as we executed bringing Kanban in. Only two teams in the entire organization would be working under scrum. - The reason for Kanban over Scrum was: 1) There was a strong mix of project maintenance and new project development in place. 2) Contrary to common belief, Kanban works great for new development and has higher flexibility of cadences, which speeds up value creation and delivery with flow over sprints 3) The Kanban method practices makes it easier to mature practice more rapidly than with Scrum 4) Flow based development results un earlier delivery over sprints 5) Starting without disruption and allowing disruption to emerge virtually eliminates resistance to change since change comes from within 6) The higher visibility of Kanban systems makes it easier to bring leadership in with the mindset desired.
- It was very important to design with the entire business in mind. Looking beyond the Information Systems to consider all the other departments, their interactions, and how to bring mutual benefit among all of them. Scrum would’ve work okay for a small portion of Info Systems and maybe also for some of the other technical departments, but definitely not for the entire ecosystem. Kanban, on the other hand was perfect for this because Kanban doesn’t replace what is already in place, but rather it takes the current state as starting point and evolves it over time. That eliminates almost all resistance to change and allows disruption to evolve from within over time.
- By doing this we: Establish a minimum bar across the entire organization from leaders to team members Bring alignment Increase rapport, collaboration, and trust Open the doors to Servant Leadership Establish the importance of quantitative management
- - By Full Value Stream we mean: Upstream Kanban, Kanban, Downstream Kanban. From Idea formalization to follow up with customer post-production - The Value Stream Map creation took several meetings will a large group of decision makers involved. Many improvements were detected while doing this, some of them were put into practice immediately such that the flow efficiency was already better by the time the VSM was completed compared to when we got started. Decision makers were thrilled by this and their motivation increased. - Regarding the initial state of the portfolio with many projects blocked, we will revisit this a bit later
- - We designed the project board and the teams’ boards (all of them for this project) looked the same, - The photo on the left-hand side of the slide
- - We designed the project board and the teams’ boards (all of them for this project) looked the same, - The photo on the left-hand side of the slide
- - Kanban is an evolutionary approach to improvement where transformation and disruption emerges from within. Here we see how the teams members themselves evolved their own domains. - We were applying all the six practices of the Kanban Method
- - As a personal choice from all employees, we also introduced Personal Kanban. Most of them adopted it. - We can see on the photo on the left-hand side how, without coaches involvement, the employees naturally started swarming to take care of issues, blockers, or development situations that required more than one person involved. The personal Kanban on the photo clearly shows that something isn’t right and so people swarmed in.
- Getting back to the Portfolio Kanban, - Daily standup meetings with all the PMs (over 40 of them) were taking an average of 8 minutes (some days they would take 3 minutes). This is because the meetings were focused on value flow (instead of on personal accounts as Scrum typically does). All PMs new on a daily basis the state of the entire portfolio. If there was a project with an important issue at Project level they all knew which project it was, what the issue was, and who is working on it at high level. Any PM was able to explain the entire portfolio board and portfolio state at any moment. - The two photos show the state of the portfolio board on day one (left) and 3 months later (right). We can see the entire value stream from project idea approval, to requirements generation, revision, tech planning, design & development, testing, UAT, documentation, staging, production, post-production, and closure. Each sticky is one project. Blue swim lanes are areas within the department. There an Expedite swim lane at the very top. - By the end of month three the number of projects at risk went from almost 50 to only 9. Most of the projects at risk were originally at the downstream steps, which is when the issues became tangible. However, we knew that the root cause is almost always somewhere else and diligent root cause analysis and discovery showed how most solutions had to do with upstream improvements an problem solving. - The thickest column is Development and is where most stickies are located. This is because most development work was being done by providers (3 provider companies). Flow there was slow compared to the rest because providers were yet to get up to speed with Kanban. This improved over time as Kanban was adopted by two of these providers.
- - PMs behavior changed from Micro-management to enablement and allowing autonomy in their teams - People work overtime went down from frequent extra hours and weekends to almost no overtime and almost no weekends working - Less people getting sick - From stressful atmosphere and silo work to people smiling, joking, and swarming.
- This metrics data is for one of the selected project
- - Very Rapidly the other departments started also applying Kanban, starting at their Portfolio level. Sone of them even before us coaches had the time to work with them. Their decision makes would shadow us to then apply by themselves and then asked us coaches to come and check what they’ve done. Thus, accelerating the adoption and shortening the lead time of adoption. -
- - Audit time came about 7 months after we started. Auditors were both impressed and curious. Impressed because improvement was evident, and curious because they didn’t understand what we were doing. So, they decided to learn so that they could audit. By doing so they also decided to adopt it. - The Marketing department also saw what was happening at the other departments and asked us to bring Kanban for them to apply it and get organized around Kanban. ------ The CEO was very pleased with the outcomes. By then, chronologically, it was about time to start doing the Annual Portfolio Prioritization. We took the opportunity to offer assisting the activity to make it more efficient and effective. The CEO accepted.
- - We used Collaboration Frameworks to do Annual Portfolio Prioritization - The Portfolio got prioritized at a fraction of the time (very valuable considering that the C-suite was involved) - It took less effort - Compared to previous years, only about 1/3 of the projects were brought to prioritization because it early in the process it was determined that most projects wouldn’t add value and so they were filtered out. - The CEO commented that for the first time he saw executives actually collaborating instead of competing for budget and for their projects to be considered of higher priority than other’s projects - The company saved hundreds of millions of dollars