Hi Good Afternoon everyone
I am Vinaya and this is Sutap – we are both agile coaches from Amdocs.
And we are here to share an alternate approach that we tried to help the Kanban implementation along in Amdocs
Please hold your questions till the end – we will save enough time for that
Before we start speaking about our change management approach, a little bit about Amdocs.
How many of you know about Amdocs?
Amdocs is more than 30 years old and primarily operates in the Telecom IT space.
We have more than 20,000 people across multiple locations.
We have customers in over 70 countries – with many tier 1 customers like AT&T, Sprint, T-mobile in NA, Vodafone, and others in Europe, Astro, Globe, VIL In APAC and an increasing footprint in other emerging markets like South America and Africa.
Our Delivery unit (where we operate) has an excellent delivery track record of meeting our milestones and many other success parameters so it’s a very successful unit.
A couple of years ago we started with our Agile journey and we chose Kanban.
Why did we choose Kanban?
Primarily for its change management approach.
We wanted to not bring in a big bang overnight change – we wanted something evolutionary.
And Kanban allowed us to retain roles, titles, processes and to gradually change and grow into something that worked for us.
It allowed each acct to figure out what change and how much they wanted to pull. It allowed people to learn and grow.
So what is Kanban? We understand that many people in the audience are probably more familiar with Scrum than with Kanban.
So - Kanban very briefly
It’s a tool to visualize your work better,
limit the WIP explicitly in order to implement a pull system and
manage the flow better – focus on issue resolution, cycle time etc.
As with any big change, we had buy in issues to tackle.
One - our delivery track record has been fairly successful in the past.
Also people were used to the tools, processes and these were veterans who had been working that way for a long time – so they were in their comfort zone.
Amdocs is considered the leader in our space.
On the other hand, these were untested waters.
There was a apprehension that moving away from fixed schedule plans would lead to a loss of control and that made people very uncomfortable.
Also our people were used to working in silos – in super-specialized teams – and asking them to work in cross functional teams was a big change.
People were used to getting cookbooks whereas we were going with a less prescriptive approach.
So what did we do about these buy – in challenges?
While we did the regular trainings and coaching at the project level, we also tried and alternate route.
We decided to try a grounds up approach – using Personal and Team Kanban
Personal Kanban is basically a Kanban board for individuals to manage their activities – whether work-related or personal.
Team Kanban is for teams to better visualize and manage their tasks.
Why did we think this approach would help us with the larger adoption?
Asking them to take the plunge into a big change at the project level meant implementing the change under the spotlight with a high cost of failure.
As opposed to this, when they were experimenting with Kanban for managing their personal work or managing team activities alone – the impact, if something went wrong, was low
and also they could learn at their own pace,
appreciate the key Kanban messages and
find what worked best for them.
This way we were influencing the individuals – who make up the culture of the org.
So this became their de facto way of working for individuals, for teams.
So working this way now at the project level – came more naturally to people.
But the best part of this journey was that we created change agents who in turn spread the word
Key Success Indicators
As you can see -we are consistently added more and more projects into the Kanban fold.
