Kanban coaching masterclass- Ravi's notes

1. Kanban Overview
and
Wine (or tea) tasting session
about
KCP (Kanban Coaching Professional) Masterclass for kanban practitioners
taught by LKU (David Anderson), during 2014, Apr 28 – May 2
&
LKNA 2014, May 5-8
Pertinent Slides & notes from KCP Day 1 to 5, with LKNA 2014 photos
Pre-requisite: “STOP Starting, START finishing” by Arne Roock
Recommended reading: David Anderson’s kanban (blue book)

2. Topics- pick and choose for discussion
• Kanban Overview
• Kanban Method
– Kanban Method’s Four basic principles
– Kanban Method’s Six core practices
• Wine (or tea) tasting session (KCP & LKNA14)
– Advanced Topics from KCP Masterclass
– LKNA 2014 Experience with photos
• References & External links

3. Kanban Method
• The Kanban method, as formulated by David J. Anderson, is an
approach to incremental, evolutionary process and systems
change for organizations.
• It uses a WIP (work-in-progress) limited pull system as the
core mechanism to expose system operation (or process)
problems and stimulate collaboration to continuously improve
the system.

4. Kanban Method

5. Kanban Method’s basic principles

6. Kanban Method’s four basic principles
• Start with what you do now
– Kanban method starts with the roles and processes you have
– It stimulates continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes to your
system.
• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
– Kanban method a change management method which encourages
continuous small incremental & evolutionary changes to your current
system.
– Organization/team must agree that continuous, incremental & evolutionary
change is the way to make system improvements and make them stick.

7. Kanban Method’s 4 basic principles
contd…
• Start with what you do now
• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
• Initially, respect the current process, roles,
responsibilities & titles
– Sweeping changes may seem more effective but have a higher failure rate
due to resistance and fear in the organization.
– It is likely that there exist organizational designs that are worth preserving.
– Kanban method does not prescribe specific roles or process steps.
– We eliminate initial fears by respecting roles, responsibilities and job titles.
– We must also seek to drive out fear in order to facilitate future change.
– This should enable us to gain broader support for our Kanban initiative.
• Leadership at all levels
– Encourage leadership at all levels- individual contributors to management.

8. If the intent is there, then the question
should be….
How Deep is your Kanban?
Visualize
Limit Work-in-progress
Manage Flow
Make Policies Explicit
Implement Feedback Loops
Improve Collaboratively, Evolve
Experimentally
(using models & the scientific method)
Shallow
Depth
Deep

9. Kanban Method 6 Core Practices
The More Specific Version
Visualize work, workflow & business risks
Implement Virtual Kanban Systems using large physical or
electronic boards in collaborative workplaces
Limit WIP
Implement WIP limits per person; avoid multi-tasking
Manage Flow
Make Policies Explicit
Implement policies for work types, classes of service and/or
value stream on your kanban board. In no particular order.
Implement Feedback loops
Kanban Kata: Standup meeting, Delivery Review & Ops Review
Choose frequencies for replenishment, delivery/release & reviews
Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally
Educate your workforce to enable collaborative evolution of
policies & ways of working based on models of workflow

10. Kanban Method’s six core practices
• Visualize
– Workflow of knowledge work is inherently invisible.
– Visualize the workflow and make it visible to understand how work proceeds.
– Without understanding the workflow, making the right changes is harder.
– A common way to visualize the workflow is to use a card wall with cards & columns.
Columns on the card wall representing the different states or steps in the workflow.
• Limit WIP (Work-In-Process)
– Limiting WIP implies that a pull system is implemented on parts or all of workflow.
– pull system will act as one of the main stimuli for continuous, incremental and
evolutionary changes to your system.
– Pull system can be implemented as kanban system, CONWIP system or DBR system.
– The critical elements are that work-in-process at each state in the workflow is limited
and that new work is “pulled” into the new information discovery activity when there is
available capacity within the local WIP limit.
• Manage flow
– The workflow through each state should be monitored, measured and reported.
– This enables evaluation of continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes to have
positive or negative effects on the system.

11. Kanban Method’s 6 core practices contd...
• Visualize
• Limit WIP
• Manage Flow
• Make policies explicit
– Until each process step is made explicit, it is hard to hold discussions about improving it.
– Without an explicit understanding of how things work and how work is actually done,
any discussion of problems tends to be emotional, anecdotal and subjective.
– With an explicit understanding, it is possible to move to a more rational, empirical,
objective discussion of issues, and have consensus around improvement suggestions.
• Implement feedback loops
– First level of feedback is daily standups, where team collaborates to review flow of work
and demand versus capability measures, metrics and indicators. This is often coupled
with anecdotal narrative explaining notable events, to enable evolutionary change.
– Second level of feedback is when demand is replenished at cadence based on lead time.
– Third level of feedback - operations review – is where organizational process
improvements occur beyond a localized team level, to realize full benefits of Kanban.

12. Kanban Method’s 6 core practices contd...
• Visualize
• Limit WIP
• Manage Flow
• Make policies explicit
• Implement feedback loops
• Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally
– Collaboration requires a shared understanding of theories about work, workflow,
process, and risk. Teams collaborate to build a shared comprehension of problem and
suggest improvement actions.
– Kanban method suggests that a scientific approach is used to implement continuous,
incremental and evolutionary changes, using common models.
– Common models are-
1. Theory of constraints (the study of bottlenecks);
2. Deming System of Profound Knowledge (a study of variation and how it affects processes) and
3. Lean economic model based on “waste” (or muda, muri and mura).

13. Advanced Topics from KCP Masterclass
• Match “Cost of Delay” sketches with Classes of service
• Cost of Delay has a 2nd Dimension
• Intangible class items are still important
• Matching Shelf-Life Risk to Capability
• Understanding capability is critical to risk management strategy
• When should we start something?
• Kanban Depth Framework- A Model for Relative Assessment
• Little’s Law- Possibilities
• Kanban Coaching Tips
• Optional Case Study: Capacity Allocation

14. Match CoD sketches with Classes of service
to establish urgency
time
impact
time
time
time
impact impact
time
impact
impact
time
impact impact
Expedite – critical and immediate cost of
delay; can exceed kanban limits (bumps other
work)
Fixed date – cost of delay goes up
significantly after deadline; Start early
enough & dynamically prioritize to insure
on-time delivery
Standard - cost of delay is shallow but
accelerates before leveling out; provide a
reasonable lead-time expectation
Intangible – cost of delay may be significant
but is not incurred until much later;
important but not urgent
time

15. Cost of Delay has a 2nd Dimension
Working capital
Working capital
time
impact
time
impact
time
impact impact
Extinction Level Event – a short delay will
completely deplete the working capital of
the business
Major Capital – the cost of delay is such
that a major initiative or project will be lost
from next year’s portfolio or additional
capital will need to be raised to fund it
Discretionary Spending – departmental
budgets may be cut as a result or our
business misses its profit forecasts
Intangible – delay causes embarrassment,
loss of political capital, affects brand equity,
mindshare, customer confidence, etc
time
?

16. Intangible class items are still important
This is the cost of delay function, typical of
Platform replacements
Legacy code replacements
Major green-field (v1.0) projects
Standard Item
Expedite Item
Cost of delay changes over long period of time
Impact
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
0
Intangible Item
Fixed Date Item

17. Matching Shelf-Life Risk to Capability
Where does our
business currently rank
Short
on these sliders?
(days, weeks,
months)
Are our business strategy and expectations aligned
with our currently observed capabilities?
Medium
(months,
quarters,
1-2 years)
If we plan to pursue short shelf-life opportunities, do
we have the agility and predictability to pull it off?
Long
(years,
decades)
Service Delivery Agility
Short
Lead Time
Long
Delivery
Frequent
Replenishment
Seldom
Frequent
Seldom
High
Predictability
Low
Kanban system dynamics

18. Understanding capability is critical to risk management strategy
If you cannot assess your current
delivery capability and align your
strategy and marketing plans
accordingly, then …
You are doomed
before you start!

19. When should we start something?
impact
When we
need it
85th
percentile
Ideal Start
Here
Commitment point
If we start too early, we forgo the
option and opportunity to do
something else that may provide
value.
If we start too late we risk
incurring the cost of delay
With a 6 in 7 chance of on-time
delivery, we can always expedite to
insure on-time delivery
time

20. Delivery Rate
Little’s Law
WIP
Lead Time
=
Backlog Ready
Avg. Lead Time
To
Deploy
WIP Avg. Delivery Rate

21. Little’s Law-
Possibilities
Backlog

22. Thinking Fast and Slow
One can notice tremendous influence of
this book from the cognitive science
domain on the lean kanban community at
Lean Kanban North America (LKNA) events
David Anderson started 6 years back.
The basis thesis of the book is simple. In
judging the world around us, we use two
mental systems: Fast and Slow.
The Fast system (System 1) is mostly
unconscious and makes snap judgments
based on our past experiences and
emotions. When we use this system we
are as likely to be wrong as right.
The Slow system (System 2) is rational,
conscious and slow. They work together to
provide us a view of the world around us.
So when anytime you read about system 1
or system 2 in a lean kanban workshop,
you will know what s/he is talking about.
How does “Thinking Fast and Slow” apply
to kanban coaching?

23. Daniel Kahneman has given us a simple
model for how we process information
Daniel Kahneman
System 1
Sensory Perception
Pattern Matching
System 2
Logical Inference
Engine
Learning by
Experience
Learning from
theory
FAST
But slow to learn
SLOW
But fast to learn

24. Kanban Coaching

25. Kanban Coaching

26. Kanban Coaching

27. Optional Case Study: Allocate Capacity
Background
• Our business is under attack from an insurgent player who is
gaining market share. Our go-to-market strategy for this year is
to defend market share by reducing subscriber churn
• Subscribers are leaving because our competitor’s service is seen
as more reliable
• If we stop new feature delivery altogether we will also lose
customers as marketing will have nothing new with which to
promote our service
• Demand for new functionality runs at 12/month. Change
requests take 30 days on average with 98% complete in 100 days
• Production Defects are reported at a rate of 100/month. They
take on average 2 days to fix with 98% complete in 10 days
• Maintenance work is designed to reduce production defect
demand by up to 10% for each item completed. They take on
average 10 days to complete with the 98% taking 50 days
• We have an established working norm of only 2 items of WIP per
person and 12 people on our team
Exercise
• Using Little’s Law, design a capacity allocation to shape demand and
deliver on your strategic goals. How long will it take before you can switch
strategy & fight with the competitor with significant new features?

28. LKNA 2014 Experience with photos
• Amdocs report- Delivery Sustainable Pace Manifesto
• Amdocs “Pull for Change” initiative- Scaling Kanban
• Lean Portfolio Management Workshop

29. Amdocs LKNA 2014 report-
Delivery Sustainable Pace Manifesto

30. Pull Thinking at work- “Pull for Change” initiative
for large-scale kanban adoption at Amdocs

31. LKNA2014 Pawel's workshop on
lean portfolio management

32. References & External Links
There is more continuous improvement happening in the Lean Kanban community with contributors like Arne Roock (known for “Stop
Starting Start Finishing!”), Russell Healy (getkanban.comgame creator), Christophe Achouizntz (known for Kanban team kaizen survey) or
Hakan Forss (known to popularize flow efficiency metric as the primary Kanban metric).
References
• Pre-requisite #1: “STOP Starting, START finishing” by Arne Roock
• Pre-requisite #2: Anderson, David (April 2010). Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business. Blue Hole Press.
• Pre-requisite #3: Anderson, David (April 2012). Lessons in Agile Management- On the road to Kanban. Blue Hole Press.
• Pre-requisite #4: Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development by Corey Ladas
• David Anderson’s blog posts & Henrik Kniberg’s blog posts
• InfoQ eBooks by Henrik Kniberg & others [e.g. Jasper Boeg (2012-02). "Priming Kanban" (in English). InfoQ]
LKNA conferences & related links
• https://plus.google.com/113439681622341364754/videos
• http://leankanban.com/case-studies
• http://blackswanfarming.com/cost-of-delay/
General References
• From lean.org, the Lean Lexicon: http://www.lean.org/Common/LexiconTerm.aspx?termid=242
• From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_%28development%29