Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Category: kanban

  • The Project Portfolio Kanban Story: A Basic Approach

    You already know why I decided to try out Kanban as a tool to organize our project portfolio. To be honest I didn’t spend much time on considering the initial Kanban board design. Remembering about experimentation mindset you should have when using Kanban I decided to start with anything which seemed sort of reasonable and adjust the whole thing on the way.

    One of observations I made recently is how we stick to standard Kanban board designs. It seems that this is a path of least resistance – to use what we already know and are familiar with. I pretty much did the same. I started with a design that I used when I was applying Kanban on a team level. I just tried to map a process in a very generic way to a list of stages, and then track projects as they go from the left side of the board to the right.

    This is what I started with:

    As you can see I started on a pretty high level. We had projects we expected to start soon, and most of them eventually were started. Then we had whole ongoing phase separated only to three, very generic stages.

    As our clients are typically rather big companies most of the time we have pretty formalized analysis phase at the beginning of a project. This stage was worth separating as it there are significant differences, both in terms of effort we invest and people involved, between analysis and building stages.

    Then there was generic building phase. I didn’t try to track details for example in projects where we had iterations. I didn’t try to show specific stages in projects where we could define them. One reason was that the development process isn’t homogenous – depending on a client, a size and a type of a project, a development team and a few other criteria this process can look differently. Another reason was I didn’t want to go into deep details, especially not with the first version of the board. After all it was expected to be changed.

    The last building stage sub-column was representing projects which went into user acceptance tests. Similarly to analysis, pretty typical stage, even for clients that get iterative deliveries. And again, a part of a process we wanted to distinguish as it usually is a pretty specific in terms of team’s involvement.

    Finally, there was maintenance column which is sort of done column on steroids. On a typical Kanban board done column is a way to say that we don’t plan to do anything with an item which made it way there. Eventually, we remove an index card or a sticky note from the column to make a room for incoming ones. On a project portfolio level moving cards into the last column is sort of double blessing. Not only do we know that we are done with building a project but we also switch into maintenance mode, which is usually the most profitable stage of a project lifecycle.

    A pretty natural move to make was attaching team names to project index cards. Even though we were changing teams responsible for projects very, very rarely I decided to go with small stickies attached to index cards as sometimes it happens that a couple of teams are working on a single project.

    Now, a couple of things which weren’t that intuitive with this project portfolio Kanban board. First, there were no limits whatsoever. I played with the idea of adding some but eventually, I came to a point that it’s not only a number of projects that matters but the size of them is equally important. In other words one team can cope with a single big project or a few smaller ones concurrently and both are perfectly acceptable scenarios. I just decided to see how it goes and make up my mind about limits later on.

    Second, the board wasn’t really co-owned by everyone in the team. OK, in a team of almost 150 people it would be sort of difficult to have a board co-owned by everyone. However, considering there are just about a dozen project teams we could have one representative of each team and we all could perfectly work on a single board. Well, we theoretically could, if not the fact that we were spread over the whole building. Also, I didn’t want to enforce on each and every team a new duty which might well change pretty soon.

    I decided to start with this project portfolio Kanban board treating it like a personal Kanban board. It was owned, updated and changed only by myself; although anytime I was learning a new fact on any of projects I was updating the board. Soon enough I started having visits not because I was in the room, but because the board was there.

    A nice side-effect of such approach was that I could have my project portfolio Kanban board on one of whiteboards in my room which meant it was always at hand.

    Either way, I knew it was sort of temporary state. The goal was either to move toward co-ownership of the board or dropping the tool all along. As later appeared I pursued this goal soon, but that’s a subject for another chapter of The Project Portfolio Kanban Story.

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  • The Project Portfolio Kanban Story: Project Portfolio Kanban? Why?

    OK, so I landed in this fine, fine job, leading a crowd (almost 150 actually) engineers who work on, well, software projects. Not a surprise, eh? With such a big team your job is mostly orchestrating things. You just have to keep the machine running and performing well.

    What you basically need is an overview of stuff. All kinds of stuff. For me personally the easiest part of catching up was people. Well, of course no matter how hard you try you won’t have the same relations with 100+ team as you had with 25 or, heaven forbid, 5 people. No surprise here, it was totally different from that neat tiny team I had previously. Anyway learning who I work with was sort of easy.

    However to make any reasonable decisions in such team you need to know, at least on the high level, who does what and how exactly you define different “whats.” I mean, you need to know all the ongoing projects their importance, relationships with clients, experience needed to successfully complete specific types of projects, and so on and so forth. In short: you need to learn hell lot of things about dozens projects.

    And you better be quick as the first person knocking to your door to ask for people for a specific project is coming next week. Early next week. Namely Monday 9 am.

    OK, first days, well, first months you spend in a fog. That’s natural. Then you start to actually know what all these teams do on a general level. Except you keep forgetting all these details: when this project starts, when another ends, how many man hours/weeks/months/years we plan for the other and which of those two are somehow connected with the other one you’ve just discussed.

    It was exactly this sort of situation I found myself in. I could have started a rugged friendship with our budgeting application but it isn’t a friendship you dream of, if you know what I mean.

    On the other hand I knew Kanban enough to play with it in completely different area and I heard there are folks applying it on portfolio level successfully. Sounded like a perfect idea for an experiment.

    To be honest I didn’t make a deep research on the subject. The basic concept is simple if you already know Kanban – you treat projects the same as you treated features and then the magic happens. Well, I might be oversimplifying a bit, but only a bit.

    After all I tackled the problem with a proper mindset: “what I start with is wrong so I will be changing my approach as I learn what works and what not.”

    My expectations were simple: visualization would help me to have control over what is happening. At the beginning I didn’t even set any goals how I wanted to adjust our project portfolio. I just wanted to start and see the early results. Knowing Kanban for a longer time I felt pretty sure there’s something good waiting for me on the way.

    Finally, I accepted the possibility that I would eventually abandon portfolio level Kanban if it doesn’t give me any value. So that’s how it all started.

    In the next post in the series you I will share what the first version of my portfolio level Kanban board was.

    Project Portfolio Kanban Story is the place where the whole series will be aggregated once further chapters are published so keep an eye on it.

  • The Project Portfolio Kanban Story

    The Kanban Story was the idea which came to my mind soon after we I started playing with Kanban with my team back then in early 2009. I thought that sort of live journal of our Kanban adventure can be an interesting thing to read. I knew that we probably got some things wrong initially but after all Kanban encourages you to have experimentation mindset and also I’m a strong believer that failure is actually a good thing.

    By the way: now that I read my story, sometimes I deeply disagree with the way we approached Kanban, yet still it was a valuable experience and hell of a lesson.

    The Kanban Story ended up as the most popular series of posts on this blog of all time and a few chapters are also high on the top 20 list. Sort of success I’d say. So when I started playing with portfolio level Kanban I decided to go the same way. I let myself a few months of experience just to have some content for the beginning and here it is: the very first post of The Project Portfolio Kanban Story.

    It will follow similar pattern as The Kanban Story which means I won’t try to address all the problems of the world but will rather focus on the specific situation and explain what we did and why. Expect much of the context and much of experimenting to find the right solution. Expect wrong decisions and changes. It’s going to be some sort of experience report. In chapters. I hope you will enjoy it as much as its predecessor.

    Here’s the list of all posts of The Project Portfolio Kanban Story:

  • Collaborative Spirit of Kanban

    Sometimes Twitter is a mine where you can dig thought-provoking gems. A couple of days ago Alan Shalloway said, as a part of a heated discussion, that:

    People who say Kanban isn’t about collaboration forget that one of the core practices is improve collaboratively (using models/scientific methods).

    I both agree and disagree.

    I mean, yes, this is true – collaborative improvements are one of Kanban principles. And yes, the word “collaboratively” is there for a reason. And triple yes, whenever you are setting up the process or improving it you work collaboratively.

    At the same time I can’t agree with boiling collaboration in Kanban down to “improve collaboratively” only.

    One of most canonical examples of improvement introduced by Kanban is on-demand swarming. When either a feature is blocked or we just have bottleneck resulting with full work-queue people swarm over it to get the flow, well, flowing again. I know Kanban doesn’t tell you that you should collaborate in such situations but actually introducing limited WIP results in many similar behaviors. People are helping each other. Last time I checked it counted as collaboration, but well, maybe we use different definition of collaboration.

    Another, pretty typical, situation I see in Kanban teams is a result of visualization – when team members see that one of their colleagues, for whatever reasons, is coping with multiple work items, they tend to help instead of just starting another feature from backlog. Sounds like collaboration, isn’t it?

    Then we have complexity of processes we try to cover with Kanban. Despite simple Kanban board we see here and there software development is usually pretty complex process. At the same time we are advised to start simple with Kanban. It means that we often come up with a board which is pretty simplified model of what we are doing. For example, usually testing/quality control stage covers both testing and bug fixing, meaning that most likely at least a couple of people work on a feature at the same time. Collaboratively. With no formal hand-offs.

    And when we are at hand-offs, with Kanban we make them visible on Kanban board. We also have incentives to optimize hand-offs, both in terms of a number of them and in terms of time features spend waiting to be picked up by the next person. Fewer hand-offs mean improved collaboration as people need to cover removed formalisms (hand-offs) somehow. And believe me, they do.

    We also work collaboratively whenever we are changing the process. I’m yet to meet a team which had this part of Kanban setup just enforced by someone. I’m sure there are such teams out there but, at least now, it is total minority. What more, usually these discussions are launched be team members, e.g. when they don’t know where to put an index card, which basically means that the process might need some improvements. This collective decision making process can be called collaboration I guess.

    I could probably go further but, by this time, you get the point. Despite Kanban doesn’t say collaboration over processes or something alike, thanks to its rules, it really fosters everyday collaboration. Usually it is all about small things: swarming over this blocked feature, quick feedback loops with that one being tested, launching a discussion about adding a column here or changing a limit there.

    Collaboration in Kanban isn’t about big words and big ideas. It is about tiny everyday actions. But please, don’t tell me that Kanban isn’t about collaboration. That’s just bullshit.

  • Alternative Kanban Board Design

    It started with Twitter discussion. Then I followed with a post on standard Kanban board designs. Dominica DeGrandis added her perspective as well. By the way, there’s one lesson I have to take from Dominica and from discussion on Twitter – we need to show people different Kanban board designs so they don’t get fixated on a standard and just stick with it.

    In the meantime I was selling Kanban to my wife, as we both believed it may help her in coordinating projects, which is what she does at her workplace. An interesting part is that she works in land surveying industry – something completely different than our everyday reality in software development business.

    And after the discussion she comes back home and tells me that she has to show me something. It appears that it is a picture of her very first Kanban board. Out of curiosity I’m asking her about meaning of different artifacts on her board and it strikes me that she’s done exactly what we want people adopting Kanban to do: she’s used Kanban board examples I drew as, well, just examples. And then she’s come up with her original design reflecting her own constraints, which are pretty different than in typical software projects.

    First, the board.

    Now, that you ask, no, it doesn’t seem like a “standard Kanban board” whatsoever. Where is the process? Where are the limits? If these questions are your first thoughts than you are fixated at least a bit.

    You should rather ask how the process looks like. It’s a bit tricky as for each big task there are a few stages. There are these which have to go one after another, but there also are those which can be done in parallel. In short: process isn’t linear.

    What more, depending on a task process can be built out of different stages. Imagine that for one task you do the whole production, from idea definition to deployment, for other you do only development, and for another only testing and deployment. OK, now you have an idea how it looks like. In short: process isn’t homogenous.

    So the basic idea is that process is defined per task. It can be safely assumed that project manager, or whoever coordinates the work, knows how to cope with each task. What is the role of columns then? Priorities! The old idea of classes of service. The closer the task is to the left side of the board the more important, or urgent, it is to deal with the task.

    Different colors of index cards are used to mark different clients as it is somehow important.

    Then, we have a trick, which I like the most. As process depends on a task it is defined on the fly for each task separately and represented by small stickies attached to index cards.

    Stickies show stages, subtasks, you-name-it which have to be done to complete a task. Green one means the subtask is completed, yellow marks ongoing one, while red color is used for blocked work (which is sort of typical situation). Labels on stickies say what kind of stage/subtask it refers to. In other words they define the process.

    Instead of defining complex graph of all possible states with dedicated Kanban board for each state we just add needed stages as we go. Isn’t that agile?

    Another nice thing about this board is how limiting work in progress can be handled here. We neither have old-school homogenous process where we limit number of tasks per stage nor dedicated boards assigned to different people where limiting WIP is done per board. However we can easily say which tasks/subtasks are ongoing: yellow stickies tell us that!

    We can limit WIP by limiting the number of yellow stickies which are on the board. In a given situation it is actually something which comes very handy, as a number of people involved in doing work is changing pretty rapidly and limits can be adjusted on the fly depending on the current situation.

    What I really like about this Kanban board design is that is addresses all the specifics of the situation in a neat way, yet it is perfectly aligned with all the Kanban principles.

    And this is why I love to work on Kanban with people from outside of IT industry. Since their constraints are so different than ours they come up with fresh Kanban board designs as our standard solutions just don’t work for them.

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  • Don’t Stick to Standard Kanban Board Designs

    As I’m lagging a bit with my reader I read recent Jurgen Appelo’s article on networked Kanban yesterday. An interesting reading, especially that it ignited a few thoughts (and a great discussion on Twitter with Jabe Bloom, Jim Benson and a few others).

    First, Jurgen’s experiments with Kanban boards are perfectly coherent with Kanban principles. We are told to visualize workflow, not to use a specific Kanban board design.

    Second, value stream mapping, which is used as one of the basic techniques by many Kanban proponents, is limiting and it brings you back to a standard Kanban board design. David Anderson avoided using the term in his writings and it wasn’t without a reason.

    Third, we use examples of typical board designs as it is so hard to explain the whole thing without showing these examples, yet it makes people fixated on typical boards and eventually their board designs are suboptimal.

    Finally, I sometimes feel we actively harm people showing them standard Kanban board designs. We prompt them to use one of our well-done solutions instead of looking for the one which is adjusted to their context and reflects their process well.

    Now, this is tricky, we’d like people to start with a clean whiteboard and totally open mind and to come up with something which reflects the way they work, presents important information in accessible and understandable way. It is pretty open-ended task, isn’t it? Unfortunately also the one which may make people totally confused.

    I’m not sure if I’d even be on the Kanban land now if I was starting with such task. I was more than happy to use the most common board design as a starting point. Now I don’t have problems using uncommon designs (just wait to see my portfolio level Kanban boards) but yes, it took some time to get here.

    Either way, my message is: no matter whether you’re just starting with Kanban or are rather advanced don’t stick to standard Kanban board designs. If you have no better idea, use them – that’s what they are for. But please, please, please, don’t treat them as the one and the only way to visualize workflow.

    On a side note: I find it amusing working on visualization with people from industries different than software development. They aren’t constrained with the good old process of building things, which was being hammered into our heads for years, namely: analyze, design, build, test, deploy. And they often come up with uncommon designs on the very first approach. Quite a lesson for us I would say.

  • When Kanban Fails

    In my story from Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 I promised I will elaborate more on my session there, titled Kanban Weak Spots. The starting point to the session was analysis of a number of situations where Kanban didn’t really work, finding out a root cause and then trying to build a bunch recurring patterns from that.

    By the way I have an interesting observation. Whenever I called for Kanban failure stories I heard almost perfect silence as an answer. It seems everyone is so damn good with adopting Kanban that it virtually never fails.

    Except I’ve personally seen a bunch of failed Kanban implementations. Either I’m the most unlucky person in the world and saw all of Kanban failures out there or for some reason we, the Kanban crowd, are still sharing just success stories and not putting enough attention to our failures.

    Actually, when I was discussing the session with fellow presenters we quickly came to the point that basically every time we think about Kanban failures it can be boiled down to people. However, and it is one of recurring lessons from lkce11, we should address vast majority of ineffectiveness to the system, not to the people. In other words, yes, Kanban fails because of people, but we change the system and only this way we influence people behavior.

    This is exactly the short version of the presentation, inspired by Katherine Kirk and Bob Marshall.

    There is the long version too. Symptoms, which show you that something isn’t working, and if you do nothing about them you’re basically asking for failure. I have good news though. Most of the time you will look for these symptoms in just one place – on your Kanban board.

    Probably the most common issue I see among Kanban teams is not keeping the board up to date. In short, it means that the board doesn’t reflect the reality and your team is making their everyday project decisions basing on a lie. A very simple example: given that there is a bottleneck in testing but it isn’t shown on a Kanban board, a developer would come to the board to see what’s next and they would decide to start building a new feature instead of helping to sort bottleneck out. Instead of making things better they would make them even worse, thanks to the board which isn’t up to date.

    I face the same problem but on a different level, whenever a team tries to make a board showing the way they’d like to work, and not the way they really work. Actually this one is even worse – not only do you make your everyday decisions basing on a lie again but it’s also more difficult to get things back on the right track again. This time it’s not enough to update the sticky notes – you need to fix the design of the board too.

    Another board-related issue would be forgetting about a good old rule: KISS. When people learn all these nice tricks they can use on their boards they’re inclined to use a lot of them. Often way too many. They end up over-engineering the board, which means that they bury important information under the pile of meaningless data. Soon, people aren’t able to tell what means what and which visual represent which situation. Eventually, they stop to care to update the board because they’re basically lost, so they’re back to the square one.

    Violating limits has its own place in hell. Of course it is a matter of your policies whether you allow abusing limits at all. However it is pretty common situation that it is generally acceptable that limits are violated very often, or even all the time. Now, let me stress this: limits in Kanban are the fuel of improvements; if you don’t treat your limits seriously you don’t treat improvement seriously either. Limiting work in progress is a mechanism, which makes people act differently than they normally would. When a developer, instead of starting to build another feature, goes to help with a blocker in testing it is usually because limits told them so. Eventually they learn to predict such situations and act even earlier, before they fill up the work queue. Anyway it all starts with simple actions, which are triggered by limiting WIP.

    The interesting thing is that all these problems can be seen on a Kanban board. The reason is pretty simple: the board should reflect the reality, no matter how sad the reality is. You deal with lousy process the same way as you deal with alcoholism: the first step is admitting you have a problem. Even if your process looks like a piece of crap show it on your Kanban board. Otherwise you’re just cheating yourself and you aren’t even starting your journey with continuous evolution toward perfection.

    There is however one driver of Kanban failure, which won’t be seen on a Kanban board. It’s also my recent pet peeve. Treating Kanban as a project management or a software development approach is basically begging for failure. It is asking Kanban to deal with something which it wasn’t designed for. It’s using a banana to hammer a nail. Seems funny indeed, but if you care about a success, well, then good luck – you’re going to need a lot of it.

    Kanban can be called change management approach or process-driving tool or even improvement vehicle but it doesn’t say a word on how you should manage your projects or build your software. If you don’t build Kanban on a top of something, be it a set of best engineering practices or project management method of your choice, you’re likely to fail miserably. And then you will be telling everyone that you need to have experienced team to start using Kanban and that it wouldn’t work otherwise.

    So here it is – a handful of risks you should take into consideration whenever adopting Kanban in your team. A bunch of situations observed by the most unlucky guy in the world, who actually sees Kanban failures on occasions. However, what I want to achieve with this post is not to discourage you to try Kanban out. Pretty much the opposite. I want you to think of this list and actively work to avoid the traps. I just want you to succeed.

    And this is why you will hear me writing and speaking about Kanban weak spots again.

    Now, even though I teased much of the content from my lkce11 session above, here are my slides.

    Kanban Weak Spots

    By the way, if you happened to be on my session in Munich please rate it.

    If you’d like to see some more content on the subject, fear not. As I’m very passionate about that I will definitely write more on this soon.

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  • Visual Management

    When I’m speaking at different events I usually keep evangelizing Kanban. Well, it’s sort of easy when you speak to an audience which is aware of this whole Kanbanish thingamajig. They may be even wrong when it comes to answer what Kanban really is but we still have a common starting point.

    The challenge starts when you try to ignite with the idea people, who not necessarily are aware of agile, lean, craftsmanship, whatsoever. Oh, maybe they even know something on the subject but they aren’t that much into it.

    Let me explain myself a bit more. If you go to a conference like Lean Kanban Central Europe (and you definitely should) you can safely assume people know the basics. On the other hand, when you go to a regular software development, let’s say Java, conference where you face folks who came there to see, well, Java stuff you can’t assume they’re all crazy about software craftsmanship, agile, lean or whatever is hot these days.

    So the question is: how do you reach these people with the stuff you believe in?

    In my case I work in the context of Kanban, so I started thinking what a gateway drug to Kanban is. My answer for this issue is…

    Visual Management

    I once wrote that visualization is my favorite part of Kanban. I also confessed that I started consciously using visualization apart from Kanban as a separate tool.

    And I want you to follow me on this path. I don’t set any pre-requisites. You may be a regular attendee on agile and lean conferences and know Kanban by heart. You can also be ignorant in terms of all that stuff and visual management should appeal to you as well.

    This is what you’ll see me advocating on occasions. OK, what is visual management? If you go with Wikipedia definition you will learn that…

    Visual control is a technique employed in many places where information is communicated by using visual signals instead of texts or other written instructions. The design is deliberate in allowing quick recognition of the information being communicated, in order to increase efficiency and clarity. These signals can be of many forms, from different colored clothing for different teams, to focusing measures upon the size of the problem and not the size of the activity, to kanban and heijunka boxes and many other diverse examples.

    In other words we use simple “visual signals,” which may be sticky notes, color pins or magnets, graphics, etc to share information among a group of people. How?

    I could have been describing how one can apply visual management in their team but let me do it in more visual way. Yesterday I had a session at ABB Dev Day, which was a very nice event addressed to developers. When I say “addressed to developers” I think that I have no freaking idea what I was doing there as my last code check-in is dated to 2003 or something. What more, my session was probably the only one which didn’t show or mention the code in any way. Now you understand the challenge I chose to face.

    This is how I tackled the challenge

    Visual Management

    By the way: If you happened to be at ABB Dev Day please rate my session and/or leave feedback.

    I owe you a few words about the event itself. First of all, kudos for hosts for organizing high-quality free event. It reminds me good old times when local branch of Microsoft was organizing such events twice a year spreading the word about their technologies.

    Despite no one paid to be there the room was full until the very end. To be honest, it doesn’t come as a surprise really as sessions were interesting, even though they touched a surprisingly wide range of subjects. One thing I could complain about is networking, which didn’t work that well, but it’s always tricky on 1-day conference where there’s no evening event and everybody is in rush to come back home.

    From a perspective of a speaker I can’t say anything but I’m totally happy with how I was handled by hosts. In other words, if you have a chance to speak at the next ABB Dev Day, don’t hesitate even for a minute.

    And if you want to hear me speaking on visual management, and sharing my passion for putting everything on the wall in your office, and spreading my love to whiteboards and sticky notes, just let me know – we’ll work something out. As I’ve already told you there are no pre-requisites – it is a tool for both beginners and vets.

    As my last slide says: Try it! You won’t regret.

    Advertisement: Want to have such nice Kanban boards in your presentations or blog posts as well? Check InfoDiagram Kanban Toolbox. Use pawelBBlog code to get $10 discount.

     

  • Kanban Story: Kanban Board Should Reflect the Reality

    The other day I had a discussion over a Kanban board design. A team has realized the board doesn’t reflect the way they work ideally. We started analyzing what happened. What did actually introduce a disconnection between the reality and the board? We ended up with quite an interesting conclusion. It appeared that the board showed the process as we’d like to see it. Unfortunately in reality the situation was far from optimal. The team wasn’t able to follow the “ideal” process even though they would like to do so.

    A natural reaction was asking a question: should we keep the board as it is and try hard to adjust the way we work to the “right” way, or we should sort of degrade the board to sad reality.

    First of all, I understand why this question pops up. We naturally want to keep the board “better” so as to help us improve our process. We expect the board to be the sign pointing toward the ideal.

    Except Kanban improvements don’t happen this way.

    Yes, you’ve already have my answer in the post title so you shouldn’t be surprised. The board should reflect the reality no matter how sad it is. The reason is simple: when you work with Kanban you make everyday decisions basing on what you see on Kanban board. Now, if the board lies you are likely to make wrong decisions.

    We probably discuss decisions like “whether I should start building another feature or maybe help with testing the other one” or “are we ready to deploy it into production yet?” However, if such wrong decisions stack up they don’t do any good to you, your team or your project.

    Not only is there hardly any improvements at all but you actively harm the project.

    Kanban improvements work differently. People change their behavior or attitude basing on what they see on the board and constraints the board enforces on them and not because the board shows the ideal world. So first, there should be a change in the way the team works and only then we should adjust the board.

    In other words the board should always reflect the reality.

    If you liked this post you may also like the whole Kanban Story series, which is a documentary of one team’s adventure with Kanban.

  • What Kanban Really Is

    I promised to share more thoughts on my Kanban presentation from AgileByExample. Actually during abe2011 there were 3 sessions which touched Kanban in one way or another. And then, well, and then there was a heated discussion, mercilessly cut off by the conference hosts. Even though we didn’t convince each other to our points (after all it isn’t the goal of discussion, is it?) I definitely learned a lot from it.

    First, to set the tone, my presentation.

    Surprising Truth about Kanban Improvements

    I shared the story how, thanks to Kanban, in one of my teams we improved our engineering practices and changed our behaviors. Kanban is such a nice improvement vehicle and I wanted to show it.

    Then, Marcin Czenko shared his experience with Kanban pointing that it is a tool for more experienced teams and that, generally speaking, teams shouldn’t start with Kanban. They should start with something more structured, like Scrum, and only then evolve toward Kanban.

    That’s how the beast has been awakened.

    I’m a living counterexample of Marcin’s hypothesis but that’s not the point. Actually Marcin’s session was just one example of something I kind of know. I mean I remember when I treated Kanban the same way. It was a couple of years ago.

    Let’s consider for a moment that Kanban is a project management of software development approach. With just a few rules Kanban can be a dangerous tool. I mean it leaves much freedom which can obviously be used in many different ways. To sanction chaotic process for example.

    OK, the moment has passed: Kanban isn’t goddamn project management or software development method! Kanban doesn’t tell us how we should build our software. It doesn’t say a word about managing projects. I don’t say you can’t use Kanban to help you dealing with software projects though. You sure can. Heck, this was the initial idea, or so I believe at least. But I beg you; please don’t rely in this area on Kanban alone. And if you do, don’t complain later.

    Kanban is a tool which helps to deal with changes and improvements. If used as they say in the instruction it should allow you to improve. Improve your process, your practices, your behaviors and your attitude. However, Kanban is no guarantee that you will have the best organization around. It doesn’t even give you some sort of benchmark which allows you to compare your team to others.

    With Kanban you don’t go to a specific point, or a specific organization, which looks like for example Scrum by the book. With Kanban you just try to be better tomorrow than you are today. Oh yes, it means that tomorrow you totally can have crappy process, useless practices, bad behaviors and negative attitude, but at least the direction of changes would be right and they would be slightly better than they used to.

    Now, if you treat Kanban as your project management or software development method you are disappointed and rightfully so. You could have done better applying one of proven methods which, when done right, sort many things out from the day one. But don’t blame the method. Blame people, in this example meaning: yourself.

    Coming back to unfinished discussion with Marcin: I would advise Kanban as a good choice for many teams which aren’t experienced much. They actually might very quickly move past the point, which they would have been in if they’d chosen to start with by-the-book method. It all boils down to their attitude to Kanban. As long as they understand how it works achieving quite impressing results is that hard.

    I am well aware this whole thing isn’t obvious and people treat Kanban differently. Especially when they played with it only in one specific environment. I don’t blame them. I explain, I bring examples, I discuss. It seems sometimes I even argue and write longish rants. But it is work which I really love to do. So, thank to Marcin, here it is: an overgrown explanation of one of my favorite David Anderson’s quotes:

    Kanban is an approach to change management. It isn’t a software development or project management lifecycle or process.