Many organizations are unaware of the benefits of Kanban. DrillingInfo was one of these companies. Using LKU’s techniques and approach to evolutionary change has created a revolution in the organization. This session will share the case study of a Kanban transformation of DrillingInfo a $100 million private technology energy company and what techniques were used to drive influence to change. Original copy for details at https://www.synerzip.com/webinar/grassroots-kanban-an-evolutionary-approach-to-change-march-23-2016/

1. 1Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
Webinar Series 2016
Kanban @ DrillingInfo
Evolutionary approach to change
Jay Paulson
March 23, 2016

2. 2Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
Webinar Series 2016
Myself
15+ years as a software engineer
5+ years implementing Kanban
Trained as a Kanban Coach in
September of 2014
Started @ DrillingInfo in
November 2014
Twitter
@paulsjv
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsjv
Lean Kanban North America 2016 Speaker

3. 3Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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DrillingInfo Company Profile
Oil & Gas Industry
Founded in 1999
Privately held
~$100 million per/year
~500 Employees
~40 Software Engineers
Austin
Denver
Costa Rica
Ukraine
India
California
Rally
JIRA
Physical Boards

4. 4Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
Webinar Series 2016
Appropriateness
Lower maturity organizations
Impatient
Panic under stress
Low trust
Poor risk management
Lack of alignment between vision, strategy & action
Lack of alignment between strategy & capability
Superstitious behavior
Revolutionary not Evolutionary
When is it not appropriate to Kanban?
Evolutionary - Humbled
Revolutionary - Arrogant, grand gestures, great victory,
hero!

5. 5Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Principles of Kanban
Flow like water around the rocks of resistance.
1. Start with what you do now.
2. Agree to pursue evolutionary change.
3. Initially, respect current processes, roles, responsibilities,
and job titles.
4. Encourage acts of leadership at every level in your
organization from individual contributor to senior
management.
Photo by Dale Ellerm

6. 6Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Where did I start?
●Trained team with getKanban
board game
●Facilitated Platform’s team
Kanban board creation
●Created physical board
●Continued to use DI’s electronic
tool, Rally
●Started to track additional 3
metrics
○Lead Time
○Delivery Rate
○Work In Progress (WIP)

7. 7Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Value Stream
Verify in
Prod
Ideas Robert Demo
Acceptance
ImplGrooming
Release
Commitment point
System Lead Time
Customer Lead Time
Options Development

8. 8Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Physical Board - Options Development

9. 9Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Physical Board - Committed Work

10. 10Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Rally Board

11. 11Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Metrics
●Captured 2 ways
○Manually in Google Sheets
○In Rally then exported
3 Basic Charts
●Histogram
●Lead Time Run Chart
●Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD)
LeanSheets.org

12. 12Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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LeanSheets - Cumulative Flow Diagram
Work in progress on specific date

13. 13Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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LeanSheets - Lead Time Run Chart
Average Lead Time 8 business days +/- 7 business days
Outliers removed average Lead Time 7 business days +/- 4
business days

14. 14Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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LeanSheets - Histogram
84% probability of completing work in 14 business days or less.

15. 15Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Metrics - Little’s Law
●A key result from queuing theory that relates a process’s
arrival rate (for which we use delivery rate as its proxy),
lead time, and work-in-progress
●The Kanban variant of Little's Law states:
The mean delivery rate of work items leaving the kanban
system, is equal to the number of work items in the
system (the WIP limit) divided by the mean lead time
through the system
Delivery Rate
WIP
Lead Time

16. 16Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Getting Better
Introduced
●Scheduling & Sequencing work
●Managing risk by Cost of Delay
●Capacity forecasting
●Classes of Service
●Fit for purpose metrics
●Capacity allocation

17. 17Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Feedback
http://djaa.com/kanban-cadences

18. 18Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Daily Standup
●Team creates agenda
●Place for feedback to occur for improvements
●Customer focus

19. 19Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Replenishment / Commitment Meeting
●Typically a part of Planning Session
●Can be on demand
●Evolve based on team and customer feedback

20. 20Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Delivery Planning Meeting
●Weekly
●Evolving to Continuous Deployment

21. 21Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Risk Review
●Blocker and Defect clustering
●Review hidden risk
●Mitigation strategies
●Review current WIP and
Options

22. 22Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Strategy Review
●Current Markets
●Review metrics (lead time,
quality, capacity)
●Capabilities
●Alignment of strategy and
capability
●Understand Risk

23. 23Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Service Delivery Review
●Discussion about system capability
●Review system metrics
●Discuss customer feedback
●Discuss system design changes

24. 24Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
Webinar Series 2016
Operations Review
●Team focused around done work, strategy, future work,
and metrics
○Histograms
○Run Charts
○System balance
○Blocker clustering

25. 25Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Operations Review
“I also am very pleased by the recent Operational Review
meeting. The presentation by the groups was concise, had
good KPIs showing where they stood and resulted in
meaningful discussion and action items that actually make a
difference in how we get our work done. I was really
impressed by how the teams worked together to help each
other.”
-- Mike Couvillion, CTO, DrillingInfo, Inc
December 22, 2015

26. 26Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Implementing on 1 team lead to...
●12 teams gathering metrics
●6 teams attending Operations Review
●3 teams with deep implementation (3-6+ months)
●Monthly Corporate training class with getKanban game
●Tracking arrivals, discards, and blockers
●CTO reporting engineering team’s capacity forecast to
executive leadership team
●CTO ability to get average cost per card per team
●Dependency tracking with Red, Yellow, and Green status
depending on individual team’s confidence level Lead
Time metric

27. 27Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Demand
Observed
Capability
Demand
Demand
Observed
Capability
Observed
Capability
Kanban at scale

28. 28Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Kanban - Theory of Constraints

29. 29Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Kanban

30. 30Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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•3
0
www.synerzip.com
Ashish Shanker
Ashish.Shanker@synerzip.com
469.374.0500

31. 31Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Synerzip in a Nutshell
 Software product development partner for small/mid-sized technology
companies
• Exclusive focus on small/mid-sized technology companies, typically venture-
backed companies in growth phase
• By definition, all Synerzip work is the IP of its respective clients
• Deep experience in full SDLC – design, dev, QA/testing, deployment
 Dedicated team of high caliber software professionals for each
client
• Seamlessly extends client’s local team offering full transparency
• Stable teams with very low turn-over
• NOT just “staff augmentation, but provide full management support
 Actually reduces risk of development/delivery
• Experienced team – uses appropriate level of engineering discipline
• Practices Agile development – responsive yet disciplined
 Reduces cost – dual-site team, 50% cost advantage
 Offers long-term flexibility – allows (facilitates) taking offshore team
captive – aka “BOT” option

32. 32Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Synerzip Clients

33. 33Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
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Next Webinar
Collaborate with Non-
Collaborators
Complimentary Webinar:
Tuesday, April 26, 2016 @ Noon CST
Presented by: Pollyanna Pixton
Author and Principal, Accelinnova

34. 34Copyright © 2016, Drilling Info, Inc. All right reserved. All brand names and trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
Webinar Series 2016
Ashish Shanker
Ashish.Shanker@synerzip.com
469.374.0500
Connect with Synerzip
@Synerzip
linkedin.com/company/synerzip
facebook.com/Synerzip