Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: kanban leadership retreat

  • Kanban Landscape and Portfolio Kanban

    One of reasons why Kanban Leadership Retreat (KLRAT) is such an awesome event is that it pushes our understanding of Kanban to a new level. No surprise that after the retreat there’s going to be much content related our work in Mayrhofen published here.

    One of sessions was at KLRAT was dedicated to sort out the Kanban landscape – how we position different Kanban implementations in terms of both depth and scale.

    Here’s the outcome of the session

    Kanban Landscape

    To roughly guide you through what’s there: the axes are maturity and scale. Maturity would differentiate implementations that are shallow and use only parts of Kanban from those that are characterized by deep understanding of principles and practices. Scale, on the other hand, represents a spectrum that starts with a single person and ends with all the operations performed by an organization.

    If we use scale as staring point we would start with Personal Kanban. If you ask me I believe that the range of depths of Personal Kanban applications should be wider (thus a bit taller area highlighted on the following picture), but I guess it’s not who should take the stance here.

    Kanban Landscape Personal Kanban

    Then we have the whole lot of different Kanban applications on a team and a cross-team level. For most of attendees this was probably the most interesting part and I guess there will be much discussion about this part across the community.

    Kanban Landscape Team Level Kanban

    For me though a more thought-provoking bit was the last part (which by the way got pretty little coverage in discussion): Portfolio Kanban. After all, this is my recent area of interest.

    Kanban Landscape Portfolio Kanban

    Since we didn’t have enough time to sort out all the details during the session the final landscape was a sort of follow-up. Anyway, my first thought about the whole picture was that the range of depth of Portfolio Kanban implementation should be broader.

    Given a simple fact that limiting work in progress on portfolio level is tricky at best, many teams start simply with visualization. Of course I don’t have anything against visualization. In fact, I consider visual management, which is implementation of the first Kanban practice, a tool that allows harvesting low-hanging fruits easily. In terms of improvements on portfolio level low-hanging fruits are rarely, if ever, a scarce resource.

    Having said that, Portfolio Kanban or not, I don’t consider visual management a very mature or deep Kanban implementation. That’s why my instant reaction was that we should cover less mature implementations on portfolio level too.

    Kanban Landscape Portfolio Kanban

    That’s not all though. When we think about shallow Portfolio Kanban implementations, e.g. visualization and not much more, we should also think about the scale. It’s a quite frequent scenario that we start visualizing only a part of work that is done across the organization, e.g. one division or one product line. From this perspective, such implementations are closer to multi-service scale than to full-blown portfolio context.

    That’s why I believe Portfolio Kanban implementations should cover even broader area, especially when we talk about low-maturity cases.

    Kanban Landscape Portfolio Kanban

    Finally, the picture would cover different Portfolio Kanban implementation I know. I guess this might mean that, in some point of future, we will go into more detail talking about maturity and scale of Portfolio Kanban implementations. However, as for now I think it is enough.

    Interestingly enough the area I propose for a portfolio level implementations covers much of whitespace we’ve had on the picture. It is aligned with my general perception of Kanban as a method that can be scaled very flexibly throughout the broad spectrum of applications.

  • Kanban Leadership Retreat

    I spent last few days at Kanban Leadership Retreat. An original David Anderson’s idea was to gather in one place thought-leaders working on Kanban and provide them a platform to exchange experience, ideas and thoughts. I must say it kinda scratched my ego in its back to be invited.

    Anyway I’m still impressed how great the event went. I mean, I know that gathering some great minds in one place and giving them free beer (one evening only, but still) is a sure-shot recipe for a stunning success. To be honest, I did have high expectations. Basically all of them were exceeded.

    As the retreat worked as unconference vast majority of sessions ended up as discussions. There was little-to-none pre-prepared content which was both good and bad. It was good because it really enabled a lot of good discussions and thought exchange but there were moments when I’d appreciate a bit of structure, which is naturally brought by standard presentations.

    Personally I’d also prefer to see sessions a bit more focused on real-life stories than on meta-level but I guess expectations on this one differed.

    Anyway, volume of mind-blowing ideas I’m still trying to think through was astonishingly high. After all, what could you have expected after inviting all those though-leaders, and I take the word “leader” very seriously here, to the same place? By the way: you can definitely expect some of those ideas shared here in near future.

    Actually I went to the retreat with a goal to discuss a few of them: portfolio-level Kanban, Kanban failures and methods of selling Kanban to teams and organizations. Lucky me, each of them have made it to the event program. And basically each of the sessions looked totally different than I’d projected. This basically means I got a new, and unexpected, perspective on ideas I’d already had which, by the way, might make attending my future sessions on Kanban way more valuable, if you excuse this shameful plug.

    But all in all it wasn’t the content which was the most valuable for me. People were. I always say that networking is the most important part of any event but this time it was totally on steroids. The format of unconference, the choice of people and never-ending Icelandic days made it the ultimate networking event. If, by any chance, I looked as a child in chocolate factory please forgive me – I had damn good reasons to look so.

    I should probably mention all great folks I was talking to, which would be kind of boring for people who weren’t there, so I’ll refrain (BTW: if somebody is curious please check people I recently followed on Twitter). But if you are the one of them I’d like to genuinely thank you for all the stuff I learned from you.

    Huge thanks for organizing the whole thing goes to David Anderson and his staff along with Hillel Glazer, who facilitated the event.

    Personally I will be there next year. That’s no-brainer for me. If any of you, by any chance, is invited you shouldn’t hesitate whether it is a good idea to go even for a second.