Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Personal Kanban

I had a late evening tea with Jim Benson in an upmarket tea house on Seattle’s Ballard Ave last week. We caught up on a bunch of stuff. We’ve met only twice since I left Modus Cooperandi in September last year. Once we brushed all the personal and business catch up aside, we got to talking about applying the Kanban approach to personal work. I’d been thinking a lot about how it might work since I saw some folks like Jon Miller who’s been blogging about his experiences. Here’s his eighth day posting. I’ve also been attending a few Seattle socialite parties lately and finding myself having to explain what my new manuscript is about. So I start with the whole deal about limiting your work in progress and only starting something new when you finish something. And perhaps I talk a little about classes of service and cost of delay (or impact of delivery time). I put the whole thing in very plain language. Immediately, people start to tell me about their own lives and work habits and how their work-in-progress is out of control. They’d start to think out loud about how limiting their WIP would change their lives and how they interact with clients and business partners. In another example, one friend I met in Atlanta 2 weeks ago, told me she had at least 20 activities on-going at work. She’s a product manager for a wireless telcom firm. So over dinner we talked about Kanban principles to see if they might help her. It was interesting how her stories echoed examples we’ve seen in corporate situations. Stories like, “I had to add that one extra task because it is a $1 million sales opportunity that we will lose if we don’t design and add the feature by end of July!” Ah ha! An request with a fixed delivery date that you are treating as higher priority (and effectively giving it a different class of service.)

So Personal Kanban has been on my mind!

Jim started to tell me about his own thoughts and it turned out that he’s been using Kanban a lot for his now 1 person Modus Cooperandi running from the attic of his townhome in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood. As we talked it through it became apparent that we drawn the same conclusions.

Personal Kanban is different! And at the same time it is the same!

Personal Kanban is different because the way an individual behaves and how the rules (or policies) or the kanban system apply to that individual are different from how the rules (or policies) of a team kanban system apply to an individual.

Personal Kanban is the same because the overall kanban system will look and work similar to that of a team. Personal Kanban is where an individual emulates the behavior of a team. Modus Cooperandi (a business) behaves like a team, even though it is powered by only one individual.

I encouraged Jim to write his thoughts down and he has. His 12 part blog series on Personal Kanban is appearing now. Part 1 - Reflections on Personal Kanban and Part 2 - Issues that Make Personal Kanban Different are already online. Follow him on Twitter @ourfounder for alerts to the future articles in the series.

Would you like to see a track on Personal Kanban at Lean Software & Systems 2010 conference? Leave a comment. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management, Jim+Benson, Jon+Miller

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Kanban Coaching Workshops Confirmed

I’m currently planning two Kanban Coaching Workshops.

[Cancelled!] Port Angeles, Washington, September 1st - 3rd.  with Special Guest Bill Dettmer
[Confirmed!]London, UK, October 16th - 18th. Venue and pricing to be announced.

The workshop will be a full 3 days. Minimum participants 3. Maximum 8.

There are some prerequisites for the class. Participants must be knowledgeable about Kanban and actively practising it in their workplace - this means actively operating a WIP limited pull system, not just a card wall. Or they must be established, recognized Agile coaches with some knowledge of Kanban gained through reading. Or participants must have previously attended one of my regular Kanban classes. Classes are planned for Sweden, UK, Germany, Belgium and Holland in the autumn. Details will be announced soon.

The coaching workshop will be a open format with an agenda to work through a series of challenging topics within Kanban. I will facilitate and start each section with some prepared material.

I won’t be “certifying” anyone. However, participants in the workshop will receive my endorsement as a knowledgeable Kanban coach and will also receive a LinkedIn reference if that is their preference. They will also be able to use my endorsement in their marketing collateral.

If I know you and you meet the criteria please sign up now. If you are in doubt, please send me an email Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban

Kanban Blogosphere Roundup July 5th

Just a quick post with a couple of nice items that appeared over the July 4th holiday weekend.

Silver Catalyst Software released this video of their new tool being used for a WIP limited kanban pull system including classes of service. Cool!

And if you want a laugh, this expose of Kanban versus Waterfall and how Kanban is clearly winning will make you smile. Truth is stranger than fiction! Truly! Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Kanban Blogosphere Roundup July 2nd

I’m unable to post these roundups everyday so they aren’t always as timely as would be ideal. A couple of these blog posts appeared within two hours of me posting the last roundup on June 30th.

Karl Scotland stirred up a lot of debate with his Fifth Primary Practice of Kanban that a goal is to reduce the number of kanban tokens and reduce the overall WIP and cycle time as a result. I agree with Karl though others have stimulated a healthy debate with some dissenting opinions.

David Draper looks at Managing WIP with Scrum and manages to get to pretty much where I’d got to when I published MSF for CMMI Process Improvement in 2006. He’s right adding Lean techniques like cumulative flow diagrams and managing the WIP will make Scrum better. And in my opinion, will lead people to go the whole way and adopt a Kanban style approach.

Luminis switched from Scrum to Kanban for a Week at the end of their product cycle as budget ran out and Scrum sprints no longer made sense for the tail end of the project. Sounds like the transition went well. They did the right thing - kept all the engineering practices the same - dismantled the Scrum Sprint bureaucracy and switched to single kanban prioritization scheme and kept the product in a shippable state awaiting the final deadline.

Check out the arrival of Simple-Kanban - another one of the new tools. The guy behind this Stephan Schmidt has been highly critical of me from Scrum-bashing. He seems to struggle with the idea of discussing Scrum’s appropriateness. There are too many people with a vested interest in Scrum being appropriate even when it’s not. The Scrum philosophy seems to be rooted in the idea, Scrum works, so change your context and adapt to Scrum. That’s fine! No one disputes that Scrum works. What many of us dispute is how easy it is to change a context. Kanban is rooted in the opposite philosophy. That changing a context is very difficult and it is easier to adapt incrementally. The mechanism for kickstarting that gradual change is to limit WIP and institute a pull system. The method for taking this approach to change has come to be known as Kanban (with a capital “K”). Apparently, saying this is Scrum-bashing!

Kelly at All About Agile blog seems to be having success with Scrum but reports that Sprint Planning is onerous at times. A fascination with Kanban is building, they the explanation of cycle time left me baffled, Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean. The conclusion that Kanban is easier to adopt on “business as usual” maintenance is clearly correct. When you switch to a full blown Kanban approach on major projects you have to change the whole approach to governance. The traditional project and portfolio paradigm requires estimates and costs to drive plans, commitments and business cases. Kanban takes a whole new approach to risk using option theory. This is a relatively new area and one I’ll be presenting on at Agile 2009.

Sylvain St. Germain seems to have received the Kanban and Collaboration message I’ve been promoting more and more recently and it seems to be resonating with him. Good! We need more people that see this sociological benefit of Kanban and recognize the softer people-centric benefits to what seems like a purely mechanical approach to process. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management