Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by Anderson David J

Author:Anderson, David J. [Anderson, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Software Development, Kanban, lean, Agile, deming, continuous improvement
Publisher: Blue Hole Press Inc
Published: 2011-04-07T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11: Establishing Service Level Agreements

We are all familiar with the concept of differing classes of service. Anyone who’s checked in for a flight at an airport understands that customers who pay more for their ticket, or who enjoy the rewards of a customer-loyalty program, are permitted to use an express lane to “cut in line.” Sometimes these privileges extend to airport security lines and include the use of a special lounge and preferential treatment at boarding time. Customers who pay more or who spend money with the airline on a regular basis enjoy a better class of service.

We are familiar with this concept in software development and IT systems work, too, most evidently with defect resolution, and particularly with production defects. We assess defects by severity (impact) and priority (urgency). High severity, high priority defects are fixed immediately. They receive a different, higher, class of service than other work. To fix a high-severity production defect, we put other work aside, pull in as many people as we require, and often make special plans for an emergency fix, patch, or release to alleviate the problem.

This concept can be applied more generally, which offers some advantages in both business agility and risk management. Some requests are needed more quickly than others, while some are more valuable than others. By offering to treat different types of work with different classes of service, we can offer the customer more flexibility while optimizing the economic outcome.

Classes of service provide us a convenient way of classifying work to provide acceptable levels of customer satisfaction at an economically optimal cost. By quickly identifying the class of service for an item, we are spared the need to make a detailed estimate or analysis. Policies associated with a class of service affect how items are pulled through the system. Class of service determines priority within the system. Classes of service allow for a self-organizing, value- and risk-optimized approach to prioritization and “re-planning.”

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