10 Years of Kanban - What have we learned

Copyright Lean Kanban Inc. dja@leankanban.com @LKI_dja
10 Years of Kanban
What have we Learned?
Presenter
David J. Anderson
LeanKanban India
December 2015

2004-2006 Microsoft XIT Sustaining Eng.
Deferred commitment pull
system coupled to probabilistic
understanding of lead time
• Improved productivity
over 200%
• Greatly improved
predictability
• Shortened lead times by
~90%
Use of Kanban systems is
minimally intrusive for
engineers. Process
methodologies didn’t change
• PSP/TSP remained in
use throughout

Conclusion
Kanban is good for service
delivery

2006 Validating Evidence
Eric Landes at Robert Bosch
copies XIT solution for intranet
maintenance and produces similar
results
HP Printer Firmware
Division, Boise, Idaho,
implements a kanban system
as part of a Lean initiative
and attributes 400% of an
800% productivity
improvement to kanban.
Lead times fall from 21
months to 3.5 months

Conclusion
Kanban and its results
are repeatable

2007 Kanban Method Emerges
Kanban systems aren’t enough
when there is too much
variability in the workflow and
too much heterogeneity of work
types and trouble matching
worker skills & experience
• Now known as a system
liquidity problem
• Visual boards are
introduced
• Kanban limits create
stress & provoke process
improvements
• Multiple classes of service
emerge

2007 Kanban Method Matures
A combination of elements of
Kanban such as system
replenishment, classes of service,
understanding cost of delay,
transparency and metrics start
to change entire company culture
Operations review drives BU
wide improvements and
starts to influence other BUs
within the firm

Conclusion
The Kanban Method is a
management system for
cultural change & improving
organizational maturity

2007 First Kanban Software
Digital Whiteboard application
developed by Darren Davis at
Corbis runs on top Microsoft
Team Foundation Server
Workers run Digital Whiteboard
on their desktop but continue to
use physical boards in parallel

Conclusion
We need software to get good
metrics easily and amplify the
management value of Kanban

2007 Kanban on Big Projects
$11 million budget project with
up to 55 people, 16 month
schedule, approximately 2400
user story scope
2-tiered kanban boards
emerge to visualize parent-
child dependencies in
requirementsIntroduces hybrid of dedicated
teams and floating project
personnel using avatars
• Specialists such as
architects, UX
• Generalists who can help
any team

Conclusion
Kanban is useful on large
projects to improve
predictability.
More guidance on prioritizing
backlogs is required at large
scale.

2008 Early Adopters Emerge
 BBC and IPC Media in London
 NBC Universal in LA & New York
 Motley Fool in Washington DC
area
 Constant Contact (Boston) &
Ultimate (Ft. Lauderdale), both
SaaS firms
Media, Internet, SaaS firms
are primary early adopters
Media, Internet & SaaS firms
suffer from acute, self-evident cost
of delay and ‘tyranny of the
timebox’ challenges. Kanban
address these issues for them

2009

2009 Lean Kanban Conference
First community conference held in
Miami. Only 58 attendees.
Sponsored by Ultimate Software
(who will continue to support us
for the next 6 years)
Full day, single track of
Kanban content includes case
studies from
• Motley Fool
• SEP
• Inkubook / Authorhouse
• Phidelis
• Yahoo!

2009 Definition of Kanban Method
 Principles
• Start with what you do now
• Agree to pursue evolutionary change
• Initially, respect existing roles,
responsibilities & job titles
 Practices
• Visualize, Limit WIP
• Manage Flow, Make Policies Explicit
• Implement Feedback Loops
• Improve collaboratively, evolve
experimentally
The Kanban Method is
positioned as an approach to
evolutionary improvement
Recognizing that kanban systems
were part of a wider management
system, the whole system is named
for the use of kanban systems

2009 “Be Like Water”
Joe Campbell’s blog post inspires
step 1 of the Ladder of Escalating
Motivation for Change, and our
primary strategy for resistance to
change which is to avoid it
This will lead to the comparison
of Kanban with Bruce Lee’s
journey with Jeet June Do, and
the development of Fitness for
Purpose and the concept of an
adaptive anti-fragile enterprise
http://joecampbell.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/be-like-water/

2009 More Validating Evidence
First case emerges which
replicates the cultural effects
observed in 2007 at Corbis
• IPC Media, London (Rob
Hathaway, Indigo Blue)
First real evidence that the
Kanban Method is a repeatable
and predictable system of
management

2009 Commercial Software
Entrepreneurs introduce
commercial Kanban software
products. Initial products come
from fans who’ve followed the
journey for years
Leankit Kanban from Nashville,
Tenessee
Tools for Agile, Silver Catalyst,
Pune, India
SwiftKanban starts in 2010

2009 “Tyranny of the Timebox”
“Tyranny of the Timebox”
concept emerges at Agile 2009
after Arlo Belshee/Jim Shore
explain the discontinuity from
discrete processes (timeboxes) to
continuous processes (kanban
systems)
• Simply making timeboxes
smaller to improve agility would
never lead you to adopt Kanban.
• Kanban was a discontinuous and
non-obvious innovation in the
Agile community

2009 Portfolio Kanban
First Portfolio Kanban example
presented at Agile 2009
• There is no WIP limit at the
portfolio level
• Limit WIP on projects, MMFs or
MVPs doesn’t make sense

2010 – Kanban “blue book”

2010 - STATIK
Recognizing the need to teach
people how to get started with
Kanban, training classes adopt
the use of the STATIK exercises
STATIK = the Systems Thinking
Approach To Implementing Kanban
• the method is presented at
conference in 2012
• the acronym will not be
introduced until 2013

2010 High Maturity Organizations
Kanban is recognized as a method
that encourages adoption of
higher maturity quantitative
methods
Kanban is also recognized as a key
part of accelerated organizational
maturity improvement
• Published case studies
describe CMMI ……..
ML1-ML2 in 3 months,
ML2-ML3 in 9 months,
ML3-ML5 in 9 months
• These timescales are “off
the scale” compared to
typical timescales for CMMI
adoption

2010 Upstream Kanban
Initially in Belgium and France
Upstream Kanban will evolve into
Discovery Kanban lead by Patrick
Staeyert and his client Nemetschek
Skia. Case study will be published
in 2013

2010 Proto-Kanban
First recognized in the Posit
Science case study in 2009, pre-
kanban system implementations
without a full pull system are
recognized as an important part
of the coaching toolbox
Richard Turner of the Stevens
Institute coins the term “proto-
Kanban” to describe these pre-pull
system implementations that
eventually evolve into full Kanban
3 Types of Proto-Kanban are
eventually recognized
• Aggregated personal
kanban
• Aggregated team kanban
• Per-person WIP limits

2010 IT Operations
 IT Ops people begin appearing in
classes
 They want to design aggregated
personal kanban boards
• Specialist workers often dedicated to
single work-item type
• Refactor to lanes for types, multi-
skilled workers with avatars
 Demand analysis & capacity
allocation become even more
important
• Especially for unplanned, irrefutable
work (push)

2010 Break out from IT Sector
Stories of Kanban in
HR/Recruitment, Sales, and other
functions emerge
Medium-sized owner-managed
firms begin to adopt Kanban
enterprise wide
• e.g. Huddle Group,
Argentina
In 2011 stories of legal firms using
Kanban for case files emerged in
UK and New Zealand

2011 Large Scale Enterprise Adoption
Business unit wide
adoption begins to
emerge at firms
such as
• Petrobras
• McKesson
• Vanguard
• Amdocs

2011 Lean Kanban University established
edu.leankanban.com
Accredited Kanban Trainer
program inaugurated with 16
founding member companies and
over 20 AKTs
• Standardized “practitioner”
curriculum published

2013 – Kanban Agendas
 Survivability
• Resilience/anti-fragility
• Evolutionary capability
 Service-orientation
• Fitness criteria metrics
• Workflow
• service level expectations
 Sustainability
• Relief from over-burdening

2013 Fitness for Purpose
Service-orientation
allows us to ask what
makes a service “fit for
purpose”
Fitness criteria are metrics that
measure things customers value
when selecting a service again &
again
• Delivery time
• Quality
• Predictability
• Safety (or conformance to
regulatory requirements)

2013 Kanban Values
Transparency Balance Collaboration
Customer
Focus
Flow Leadership
Understanding Agreement Respect

2014 Kanban from the Inside

2013 Scale-free understanding
Eliminating unbounded queues
• Proto-kanban to full
workflow kanban
• Coupling interdependent
network of kanban
systems
Andy Carmichael’s Smallest Possible
Definition of Kanban
See Flow,
Start Here,
With visible work & policies,
validate improvements
Core practices renamed
“general practices” with specific
practices at different scales
• Personal/team Kanban
• Service Delivery /
Workflow Kanban
• Portfolio Kanban

2014 Kanban Litmus Test
1. Have managers changed their
behavior?
2. Has the customer interface
changed?
3. Has the customer contract
changed?
4. Has the service delivery business
model changed?
If you can’t answer yes to at least 2 of
these questions you aren’t doing
Kanban yet!

What we now know!
 Kanban systems are applicable for
almost any creative or knowledge
work service delivery workflow
 The Kanban Method is appropriate
wherever an evolutionary approach
to change is desirable
 Kanban works in low and high
maturity organizations but basic
maturity or converged workflow
steps are required to model and
implement a kanban system

What we now know!
 Use of Kanban consistently shows
200-800% productivity gains and
50-90% lead time improvements
where a baseline is available
 Personal Kanban is a “gateway
drug” to introduce Kanban in the
office
 Personal Kanban in the office is
known as Team Kanban and is a
form of Proto-Kanban
 Getting beyond Proto-Kanban is
challenging!!!

What we now know!
 Kanban represents about 3% of
the Agile market by revenue.
 Shallow/Proto-Kanban is widely
adopted but represents no
market value
• Physical boards
• Little or no training or consulting
 Kanban is more readily adopted
by non-IT people who have no
“methodology baggage”

What we now know!
 Kanban depth & maturity maps
to organizational maturity level
 Kanban adoption doesn’t work
without sharing some of the 9
values
 Kanban maturity does not
improve without leadership
 Kanban can be culturally
challenging for many businesses

A vision from 2003
In 2003, I described my
work with Feature-driven
Development (FDD) & Agile
Management as “like MRP
for Knowledge Work”
Instead Don Reinertsen said, “you
have all the pieces in place to adopt
the use of kanban systems”

Kanban to MRP
 1947 Kanban in manufacturing –
Taiichi Ohno
• Term “kanban” not adopted until
1964
 1964 Manufacturing
Requirements Planning – Joseph
Orlicky
• Book published in 1975
 Kanban to MRP 17 years

A vision for 2015
We now have all the pieces in place to
start managing modern business where
employees “think for a living” and make
decisions – knowledge worker businesses
– and managing them with the rigor,
anticipation and risk awareness that I
envisaged in 2003
I now call this future vision
Enterprise Services Planning (ESP)

Enterprise Services Planning

You are part of a professional services business!
An ecosystem of
professionals
providing
interdependent
services, often with
complex
dependencies.
Professional
Service
organizations
build intangible
goods

The challenge of professional services businesses
A constantly changing
external environment
has a ripple effect
across your entire
business ecosystem
Priorities change and
required capability & service
levels rise in response to
competition, disruptive
market innovation &
changes in customer tastes

What should
we start next? Will it be
delivered when
we need it?
Do we have
capacity to do
everything we
need to do?

How will
dependencies
affect our
ability
to deliver?
How many
activities should
we have running
in parallel?
If we delay starting something,
will the capacity be available
when we need it?

Demand
Observed
Capability
Demand
Demand
Observed
Capability
Observed
Capability
ESP – Anticipating Demand, Allocating Capacity
Looking downstream, you
want the system to help
you anticipate and
manage dependencies

Demand
Observed
Capability
Demand
Demand
Observed
Capability
Observed
Capability
Looking upstream, you want the
system to help you anticipate and
manage demand

Demand
Observed
Capability
Demand
Demand
Observed
Capability
Observed
Capability
Combine the two, and
across the organization
you smooth flow end-
to-end and help keep
demand in balance with
overall system capability

*Kanban is a way to organize and manage work. It improves
service delivery speed & predictability through a combination of
limiting work-in-progress & deferred commitment
It uses visual management and Lean techniques such as limiting
the amount of work in progress, and probabilistic forecasting.
Kanban helps to balance demand with capability.
Balancing demand and capability = improved flow.
Improved flow = Improved predictability.
Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) is an enterprise-wide
management solution that leverages Kanban*
to improve each service within your business.

Manufacturing
1947 – Kanban
1964 & 1975 – MRP
Professional Services
2004 – Kanban
2015 – ESP
ESP is “MRP for professional services”.
ESP is for managing capacity &
scheduling intangible work.
ESP uses algorithms enabled with data from
analysis of the work requests, our existing
capability, and knowledge of customer
expectations, to make recommendations

Planning involves…
Scheduling
Sequencing
Selecting
Commitment
Anticipating & Managing
Dependencies
Risk Management
Understanding what is
essential based on…
 Business strategy
 Fitness for purpose

The Right Things
At The Right Time
Done The Right Way
With Appropriate Risk
Exposure

ESP & Kanban is a complete management system
Managerial Motivator
• Senior-level
• Lead the business (strategy and
positioning)
• Confidence they can deliver on strategic
goals
• Legacy (long term survival)
• Mid-level
• Up-managing – answer the hard questions
with confidence
• Down-managing – make difficult decisions
with confidence
• Line-level & Individual
Contributors
• Relief from abusive environment
• Overburdened
• Quality suffers
• Low job satisfaction
Kanban Agenda
• Survivability
• Service-orientation
(and customer focus)
• Sustainability

Thank you!

About
David Anderson is an innovator in
management of 21st Century
businesses that employ creative
people who “think for a living” . He
leads a training, consulting,
publishing and event planning
business dedicated to developing,
promoting and implementing new
management thinking & methods…
He has 30+ years experience in the high technology industry
starting with computer games in the early 1980’s. He has
led software organizations delivering superior productivity
and quality using innovative methods at large companies such
as Sprint and Motorola.
David defined Enterprise Services Planning and originated
Kanban Method an adaptive approach to improved service
delivery. His latest book, published in June 2012, is, Lessons
in Agile Management – On the Road to Kanban.
David is Chairman & CEO of Lean Kanban Inc., a business
operating globally, dedicated to providing quality training &
events to bring Kanban and Enterprise Services Planning to
businesses who employ those who must “think for a living.”

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