Practical Kanban: From Team Focus to Creating Value by Klaus Leopold

Author:Klaus Leopold [Leopold, Klaus]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: LEANability PRESS
Published: 2017-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

In order to answer these questions, we put together a change team—a “guiding coalition” as John P. Kotter would call it (Kotter, 2012). This 12-person change team first looked at which stakeholders influenced the system and tried to understand where the actual problems were located. During the entire change process, this team functioned as the contact for all questions that emerged and they steered all activities involved with implementing Kanban.

In a system design workshop, the change team built a Kanban system at the project level, but it was not an outline for how the employees were supposed to work in the future. The object of the visualization was the current process being used, not the one that was desired. The change team consisted of representatives from project management along with those delegated by the teams, from a simple project worker up to a department manager. This team composition, taken from across the company hierarchy, made it more likely that the system would reflect reality.

Visualization: the project board across teams

Where are the borders of this system? What is the input to the system, and what comes out? What do we do in between? With these questions, we established how value was created. The system borders were positioned end-to-end since the entire development was included in this project. Figure 3.2 shows the value creation process that was identified by the change team at that point.

Figure 3.2: The Value Creation Process and the Dependencies Within the Project The initial sparks were at the beginning of the development process. They could be rough ideas, or sometimes they were specific concepts already checked by marketing. In the next step, the ideas were confirmed with requests from the stakeholders, aligned to other projects within the company and the risk was assessed: Costs, possibility for profit, technical complexity and marketplace role. The result from several iterations of this step was the decision of whether or not an idea would be implemented. Before the Kanban initiative, requests were simply hurled over the fence and the development teams were left holding the bag. Even in the workshop, the change team realized that the communication with one another at this handover point should be better. They modeled this improvement as an activity in the Kanban system: The business requirements served as a discussion foundation to separate the work items into a reasonable size within the “Partition Epics” activity, allowing for regular feedback. The remaining steps were left unchanged. Parallel to the development, component tests were conducted, followed by the integration and acceptance tests, with the result being the rollout of the newest version of the program. Hence, we had obtained the basis for the across-team Kanban board.

We consciously disregarded responsibilities in the first step, in order to free ourselves from the organizational structure. Only after the value creation was clarified did the change team think about who was needed in the individual steps. Figure 3.2 shows how diverse the dependencies were. Team optimization would have been extremely counterproductive, because the only thing that would have been accomplished was every team concentrating on their little part.

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