Monday, September 26, 2011

Kanban Leadership Workshop Miami, FL - Jan 11-13, 2012

This 3-day leadership/coaching workshop with David is limited to just 12 people.

This workshop is for anyone tasked with leading a change initiative in their organization or at a client organization in 2012. It is suitable for managers, process engineers, change agents, experienced Agile, Lean, or project management coaches and consultants, existing Kanban practitioners with 1 year of experience, and those who have previously taken David J. Anderson’s Kanban class and are actively using Kanban at work. Attendees are expected to be familiar with the content of the book, “Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business.

These intensive 3 day workshops are intended to transfer the knowledge and skills to enable you to lead Lean transformations using the Kanban Method

The 2012 price for this workshop is $3500 USD per person.

Register today!
Regular price $3500 per person
EARLY BIRD SPECIAL $2800 per person!

A copy of the book will be supplied upon registration. Attendees will maximize the value if they are already familiar with the material.

The intent is to have an interactive collaborative session designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning. Attendees should come prepared to discuss their own experiences with Kanban and challenging situations they’ve faced with change initiatives at clients or employers

The workshop will open with a round table of introductions and shared Kanban experience. Each participant will be asked for a list of questions they’d like answered over the 3 day session and from this a topic backlog will be built. David will augment this backlog with essential topics and foundational material. The agenda for the remaining time will then be set to insure the fullest of coverage and the maximum value for all participants. The focus will be on shared experience and discussion of the hard questions that clients and team members ask coaches during the introduction of Lean ideas through the use of a kanban pull system. The workshop will include the use of the GetKanban game simulation and discussion of its value as a teaching aid.

The goal is to enable participants to go back into the field and successfully coach Agile/Lean transitions using the Kanban approach. Every workshop is different because of the unique experiences of each participant and their specific focus and desired outcomes. Each participant will received a personal recommendation from David J. Anderson as a result of participating in the class.

Kanban offers agile and project management coaches another tool in their transformation and coaching toolbox. Kanban is proving to be a facilitator of evolutionary change with low resistance and an enabler of accelerated high levels of organizational maturity.

For more details download the PDF flyer

Location: Miami, FL
Venue
DoubleTree by Hilton Grand Hotel Biscayne Bay
1717 North Bayshore Drive, Miami, Florida, United States 33132-1180
Tel: 1-305-372-0313   Fax:  1-305-539-9228

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Emerging Signs of Kanban at Scale in Healthcare

By Dominica DeGrandis 

Yesterday, I visited a large health services organization that is in the early stages of implementing kanban.  Founded in Seattle in 1947, Group Health Cooperative provides health coverage and care, and with approx.10,000 staff, is one of the largest private employers in the state of Washington.  It is a fine example of a large, long-established organization that has turned to kanban as an instrument for improving performance. 

GHC management has a long history of being at the forefront in implementing systems and technology to refine its services.  About ten years ago it became one of the first large health services organizations in the country to transfer all of its patient records from paper to digital.  And now, they are embracing Lean concepts in knowledge work to improve productivity.

The healthcare giant’s “Core Operations” team is leading the initial kanban effort, using it for production maintenance.  This is a classic area for introducing kanban into an organization - making small incremental improvements is well-suited for sustainment work.  I particularly enjoy how this kanban board is cross-functional and includes “SysAdmin” tasks.

Kanban is spreading through the organization.  A development team is now adding kanban practices to its current process to improve visibility.  The objective is to better understand when work is truly ready to be pulled to avoid the thrashing that has been flattening out their burndown charts.  Making the work visible is helping them see the actual state of their progress and is revealing crucial work that was previously unplanned.

This large company appears to be on course for ongoing improvement by gradually implementing changes to their kanban system design.  It was a pleasure to watch their kanban-in-action, and I’m delighted that we have yet another case study from a large organization to add to our training material – just in time for the next Kanban for IT Services & Operations class.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Kanban Training Class - San Francisco Bay Area, CA Sept 12-13, 2011

David J. Anderson’s

Official “Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business” Class

Masa K. Maeda (instructor)

This intensive 2-day Kanban training class provides an introduction to Lean, Pull Systems and Kanban and will explain how established industrial engineering theory can apply to software development process.

This class is based on David J. Anderson’s book “Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business”. Attendees of the class will receive a copy of the new book.

Participants in the class will learn how to use the simple process of limiting work-in-progress as a driver of change. Kanban is a change management method and a different approach to striking agreements between IT and the business.

You’ll learn how to define the policies that constrain the collaborative game of software development. You’ll learn how to use those policies to manage risk and to reset negotiations and recast them as collaborative problem solving.

Used effectively, Kanban will change you and your organization. If your workplace has been stagnating and you are looking for new ideas to unleash productivity, innovation, collaboration and creativity, take 2 days and come along.

What you will learn

About the presenter

Masa is an internationally recognized figure in the agile and lean communities who has focused most of his career on making organizations successful through the balance between value-to-customer, value-to-enterprise, and quality. He has brought Kanban, Scrum, lean, and agile to organizations of diverse size in three continents. With 25 years of experience, his career path has taken him from Fortune 100 to startups from diverse industries in USA, Japan, Mexico and Panama. Before focusing entirely on Lean and Agile, Masa worked at Apple Inc. and was founding team member at several startup companies in Silicon Valley in the fields of genomics/proteomics, online entertainment and online socialization.

Is this for you?

If you are a software development executive, project manager, development manager, project lead or developer and you would like to learn how Lean, Pull Systems and Kanban can provide a useful perspective to consider the entire value chain beyond the pure software development, this Kanban class is for you!

Location:

San Francisco Bay Area (Belmont - short drive between San Francisco and San José airports), CA USA

Venue:

Hyatt Summerfield Suites Belmont
400 Concourse Way, Belmont CA 94404
Between San Francisco and San Jose airports.
http://www.belmont.summerfieldsuites.hyatt.com

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Webinar - Introduction to Lean-Agile and Kanban

Presenter: Masa Kevin Maeda

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM MDT

Agile and its methodologies have had very positive impact in many organizations. Methodologies have matured over time to make them more effective, and limits have been identified as diverse discussions at conferences have shown in the last few years. Lean has been gradually accepted as a way to broaden our perspective to mature teams and organizations; and Kanban is a recent method that has been showing tremendous benefits through continuous improvement and accelerating maturity. In this webinar Masa will give us: • An introduction to Lean and to how it fits perfectly well with Agile • A brief introduction to Kanban to understand some of its benefits.

Register now

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Kanban and the DoI

In 2004 I was involved with a group of recognized professionals in the field of project management who came together to define what agile project management ought to mean. The outcome of those meetings was a statements of values, published in February 2005, given the name Declaration of Interdependence. While I’m not in love with the name and find it rather pompous, I find the content of the Declaration has stood the test of time over 6 years. While the declaration sought to define a value system by which modern 21st Century project managers should live, it’s secondary purpose to galvanize a community around general application of agile project management failed to materialize. Five years on, it is worth reflecting on my contribution to the DoI and how it aligns with the Kanban work that I am best known for since then.

Declaration of Interdependence

We are a community of project leaders that are highly successful at delivering results. To achieve these results:

• We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.
• We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.
• We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation.
• We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.
• We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.
• We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.

[©2005 David Anderson, Sanjiv Augustine, Christopher Avery, Alistair Cockburn, Mike Cohn, Doug DeCarlo, Donna Fitzgerald, Jim Highsmith, Ole Jepsen, Lowell Lindstrom, Todd Little, Kent McDonald, Pollyanna Pixton, Preston Smith and Robert Wysocki.]

We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus

As many of my readers are aware kanban systems limit work-in-progress and signal new work to start only when there is capacity to process it. This “pull” mechanism is used to improve the flow of work. So kanban systems are focused on flow. However, the way kanban systems have developed for software development goes well beyond a typical manufacturing implementation, as Don Reinertsen pointed out to me during a visit to my office in 2007. In the Kanban method we use classes of service linked to (opportunity) cost of delay and explicit visualization of handling policies to improve the return on investment made in operating the software development activity. By visualizing the workflow, limiting WIP, managing flow, measuring lead times, and optimizing risk and value delivery with classes of service based on the economics of delay, Kanban explicitly delivers on the first statement of the DoI. It is no surprise that it is this first of the six statements that are so heavily associated with my contribution.

We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.

Kanban engages customers through visualization, through interaction and escalation when items are blocked, through the regular cadence and collaboration of input queue replenishment meetings and through the regular cadence of delivery and the planning of each delivery. Kanban asks customers to take shared ownership of the system and its effectiveness and to throttle their demand to the rate at which the system can deliver.

We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation.

Kanban embraces uncertainty and it manages for it through provision of classes of service such as “Expedite.” This demonstrates anticipation of demand. It also manages for it through use of quantitative measurement such as statistical process control and definition of target lead times based on statistical observation of capability. This again shows how the system can anticipate an outcome and manage for variability and uncertainty. Kanban is also design to encourage adaptation by using the WIP limit and the social interaction of standup meetings and operations reviews to reflect upon performance, observed capability and effectiveness and allow for process improvements to be suggested based on a scientific approach that uses models of process flow, variation, uncertainty and complexity to facilitate implementation of successful adaptations. Kanban is specifically design to anticipate and adapt as the method is designed using concepts of both Systems Thinking and Complex Adaptive Systems.

However, depending on how you define “iterations”, Kanban implementations often do not use them! Time-boxed increments (often referred to as “iterations” by agile practitioners) are replaced with cadence. The core activities of accepting new work and delivering finished work are usually still performed regularly but each activity has its own cadence. For example, input queue replenishment may happen once per week - a cadence of weekly - while delivery may happen every second week - a cadence of bi-weekly. Cadence is a more sophisticated tool than time-boxed iterations.

“Iteration” meaning “to rework or refine” is supported by Kanban.  However, it is still relatively unusual to see such implementations. If for example, a team follows an explicitly iterative method such as Barry Boehm’s Spiral Model, then it would be possible to wrap a kanban system over that and to limit WIP at each step on each loop of the spiral. There have even been instances of team’s visualizing such a process with a board that resembles a dart board or archery target rather than the familiar columns and rows typically associated with Kanban.

We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.

Kanban is specifically designed to enhance the power of the people within the system. By limiting WIP, kanban systems both create slack to allow creativity and innovation room to sprout and flourish, and the act of making process policies explicit provides protection for those working within the system, limiting abuses and attempts to exploit individuals and work around limitations. The explicit policies, often visualized on a board, enable individual team members to make high quality decisions about the economics, risks and intangible expectations of all stakeholders. As a result Kanban enables individuals to be creative about their process, to innovate and adapt to improve customer service and value delivery. It gives them the empowerment to make their own decisions and to optimize the economic outcome to the benefit of customers, business owners, value-stream partners and team members.

We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.

Kanban uses a monthly operations review meeting that involves all team members across an organization, plus senior management, and up- and down-stream stakeholders. At operations review quantitative, objective, statistical data on the performance and capability of the system is reviewed openly by all involved and design changes to the system are proposed and assigned to managers for implementation. Through this operations review process Kanban insures that performance is boosted continuously through the wider group of stakeholders taking shared responsibility for the effectiveness of the system and the team of people operating it.

We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.

The first emergent property of Kanban is that each process is uniquely tailored to its context. For each system, the value creation network will be different; the risk profile will be different; the team and its skills and capabilities will be different; the nature of demand will be different; and the cost of delay in work items will be different. Every context deserves a uniquely tailored process in order to optimize the economic outcome for all stakeholders. The foundational Principles of the Kanban Method are based on the premise that process definition starts with whatever is happening now and evolves it incrementally through a process of small changes each justified economically and based on a scientific approach to improving performance. Situationally specific strategies, process and practices are core to the Kanban Method.

Conclusions

Not only is it easy to see how the Kanban Method relates to the Declaration of Interdependence and to see how my emerging “agile” work at the time was aligned with it, we could go further and say that Kanban is in fact a full implementation of the Declaration of Interdepedence. It is a manifestation of how 21st Century Project Managers ought to be working. The irony of this may be that Kanban encourages a service-delivery rather than a project-centric approach to work.

Meanwhile, for me personally, I look back on the Declaration of Interdependence as a piece of work that I and the other authors can rightly be proud of, 6 years on. I am also happy that this review of the Kanban Method and how my work evolved in those 6 years shows a high level of consistency and that Kanban demonstrates that it lives the values defined in the Declaration.

I’ve been guilty of not publicizing the Declaration of Interdependence enough. I’m not the only author who fails to make enough use out of it. It rightly is something to be proud of and it deserves a higher profile within the Agile and Lean/Kanban communities.