It's been a week since I posted one of these summaries. I've been busy on other stuff and haven't had much time for blogging. Meanwhile, Kanban is generating on average 2 tweets per hour on Twitter and there has been some active new blogging and meetings in the past week. Agile Denver has a good crowd for Brad Swanson presenting his experience moving to Kanban from Scrum and why Kanban worked better for his team. Tonight the Limited WIP Society London chapter will be meeting at XtC. And...

Getting Started with Kanban

David Joyce had over 100 people at the BBC last week for his Kanban presentation in London. Skillsmatter have made the video available. I'm told that David used a lot of material from me and Karl Scotland and I'm sure this is a very comprehensive introduction on how to get started with Kanban. The BBC is one of the largest adopters of Kanban and has taken a lead in the media industry which is generally an early adopter of the technique. It seems that media schedules don't fit nicely into time-boxed iterations and first generation Agile approaches are at best a forced fit. Kanban seems to be gaining traction because it decouples prioritization, cycle time and delivery and allows them to fit naturally into media cycles.

Kanban and People

Last week Henrik Kniberg posted this education cartoon, One Day In Kanban Land. This is a stop frame of part of his animated story from his Kanban versus Scrum presentation that you can see at QCon in San Francisco this coming November.

The Toyota Half Way is a nice piece from Bob Emiliani explaining that TPS has two halves - the continuous improvement half made up of Challenge, Kaizen and Genchi Gembutsu and the Respect for People half made up of Respect and Teamwork.

One or two folks on Twitter jumped on this and suggested that Kanban belongs the in the first half and that Kanban doesn't address the second half, so it is only a half way solution to the Toyota Way applied in software engineering. This couldn't be further from the truth. It seems many folks just see the mechanism - the cards, the WIP limits, the signals, and don't listen to the stories and the effects and the outcomes, or for that matter the motivations. It makes me believe that many people don't actually take the time to watch the presentations before they pass comments.

One of the original motivations for Kanban (in software development) was to limit WIP to enable a truly sustainable pace and to eliminate variability from the day-to-day lives of the workers. This truly shows respect for the knowledge worker. Kanban and its policies empower workers. What is more respectful than empowerment? Kanban encourages teamwork across the whole value stream. It changes the culture of an organization and the result is a much more collaborative workforce. Henrik's One Day in Kanban Land cartoon demonstrates this admirably.

So it's entirely false to suggest that Kanban only delivers the Toyota Half Way. Perhaps those saying this need to reflect that 'respect' does not equal 'politeness' and 'teamwork' need not only be among defined teams. 'Respect' in this context means trust, empower, and do not punish failure rather seek to learn, understand and adjust. 'Teamwork' in this context means collaboration at all levels and along the full value stream.

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And finally, I missed this earlier post from June 10th on the costs of iterations with Kanban. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management