Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: process improvement

  • Portfolio Kanban and Doing the Right Thing

    There’s an ongoing discussion that I occasionally refresh with Markus Andrezak on usefulness of applying Kanban to manage portfolio and generally to the process of figuring out which products should be built.

    What is Portfolio

    One obvious thing that we can start with is focusing on a specific context. After all portfolio is a pretty loaded word and it is used in all sorts of situations. While my goal isn’t to boil down portfolio discussion to only few available options I see at least three distinctively different cases.

    There are organizations that ore focused on project work. A typical gig they run would be a distinct initiative that is different form all the other initiatives they run. What’s even more important the revenue from that work would be connected to delivering work. This would be a project portfolio case. A classic example would be an offshore web software shop.

    Then we have organizations that, similarly to the previous example, focus on building multiple concurrent and independent initiatives yet they would operate them as products by themselves. In other words they earn money by directly selling their software, or services provided by that software, to the end users. There’s no simple definition when the work is done. This would be a product portfolio case. A classic example would be a game development studio.

    Then there is an alternative version of product portfolio where the whole company is focused on building a single product. In such a case the overarching initiative that everyone contributes to is obvious as there is only a single one. The discussion would happen between either specific goals to achieve or specific big scale functionalities to build. This would frequently be labeled a product portfolio too although for the sake of this discussion I’d go with a feature portfolio label, even if it isn’t precise especially for big organizations. A classic example would be a startup building what they believe is the next world-changing product.

    Of course we can think of a mix of any of these scenarios and rarely only one of them will be pursued by an organization exclusively. What’s more we could go further with a differentiation within these scenarios. We’d see a completely different dynamics of project portfolio in a company that works under time and material terms than from one that build fixed price projects. A very different feature portfolio will be in a startup at an early phase which is still figuring out product-market fit that in an established company focusing on leveraging their user base or staying ahead of competition.

    Where is the Problem

    The discussion about applicability of Portfolio Kanban boils down to defining what is the most painful problem on a portfolio level in a given context. From that perspective there is a clear distinction between project portfolios and the other two scenarios. The difference is in the way revenues are generated.

    In project work the more projects we finish the more revenues we can expect. With product or feature portfolio building software is only an intermediate step in order to generate revenues. In other words we know much more up front about return on investment in project portfolio scenario than we do in other two.

    That doesn’t completely change the bottom line. In each case the choice on endeavors an organization works on is crucial for its long-term health. In each case overcommitment and too much work in progress on portfolio level can decimate the value of any ongoing work, no matter how carefully chosen. There are commonly mentioned reasons for that: long lead times mean long feedback loops and a lot of work in progress results in inefficient work.

    There’s one more dimension that from my experience is at least equally, if not more, important. The constraints provided by work in progress limits change the dynamics of the discussion about starting new stuff, be it projects, products or major features.

    Typically the discussion about economic feasibility of starting a new product or a project happens in isolation. If the ultimate problem that we are trying to solve is choosing the right initiatives to work on it should never happen in isolation. After all most of ideas we come up with make sense… in some context. An interesting question would be whether we are in such a context.

    We may have a bunch of projects that we expect to be profitable. But which of them provide us most monetary and non-monetary value? How starting another one affects the ones that are already ongoing? Given a business hypothesis which we want to validate, which out of all possible experiments would generate most valuable information? Would starting another concurrent experiment obfuscate the outcomes of ongoing ones?

    Of course we can say that each project will provide some value and each experiment will provide some learning opportunities. We don’t have infinite capabilities thus we need to choose.

    Role of Portfolio Kanban

    The way I look at Portfolio Kanban is that is addresses a very common issue of overburden at portfolio level and as a result it drives the discussion about what are the right endeavors to pursue. The latter starts happening when, thanks to WIP limits, we start saying no to new initiatives. What WIP limits create is they underscore available capabilities as a scarce resource. The next step typically is more careful consideration how these capabilities are put in the best use, which ultimately means a discussion about what is the right thing to build.

    Obviously this dynamics is not true in all environments. Startups, especially at the early stages, will likely focus on figuring out what is the right thing to build without any external incentive. Organizations built around a single product, at least to a certain size, will naturally maintain discipline in strategy planning that will provide an answer what are the crucial product goals for them.

    Beyond that it all gets fuzzy. If an organization gets big enough it has capacity to build multiple initiatives concurrently. Each product that grew far enough has a number of potential development paths it can follow and each of them can be promising on its own. If we talk about multiple product organization a temptation to follow a bunch of new goals at the same time is even stronger. And with projects it’s like an everyday issue.

    Of course I don’t say that it’s not possible to start the other way around: nailing down the ultimate purpose, which may mean answering the Spice Girls question, and following up with defining what are the right features, products or projects that serve the purpose. This would likely mean that the number of concurrent initiatives will be limited as majority of activities would be optimized toward pursuing the purpose.

    The problem is few organizations are ready to make this step just like that. And even when they are, there are still a lot of risks along the way. First, depending on how the ultimate goal is defined it doesn’t have to limit the options for what constitutes an attractive endeavor and we’re back to the square one. Second, even if the purpose provides enough focus there’s typically still plenty of options how to pursue the goal and thus overburdening portfolio is still a viable option. Third, and most importantly, in bigger organizations defining a single purpose may be impossible because office politics kicks in or there isn’t enough strategic leadership present.

    In either of these cases as well as in the most common situation where there isn’t enough awareness to even start the discussion about the purpose Portfolio Kanban may serve as a facilitation tool. On the top of efficiency gains, similar to those seen in other applications of Kanban, it would catalyze the discussion about what is the right thing.

    This is, in fact, the most important outcome of introducing Portfolio Kanban that I’ve seen.

    What Portfolio Kanban Is Not

    An argument I’ve heard a couple of times is that Portfolio Kanban doesn’t help to define what is the right thing to build or what is the ultimate purpose. I completely agree with this one. That answer simply isn’t there. Portfolio Kanban, pretty much alike any Kanban application, is a meta method. One shouldn’t expect to get context-specific answers.

    If an organization is ready to look for these answers that’s great. Depending on specific context Lean Startup, Lean UX or other modern product management approaches may be relevant. That’s where awesome guys like Will Evans or Markus Andrezak kicks in with their expertise. That’s where Stephen Bungay’s work will prove invaluable, which Jimdo guys will happily confirm. That’s where Don Reinertsen would provide outstanding guidance for decision making.

    In such cases, usefulness of Portfolio Kanban will indeed be limited. It will be mostly process improvement and efficiency stuff.

    A common case wouldn’t be even remotely as rosy though. That’s why value provided by Portfolio Kanban typically go beyond the process stuff. It would still stop at introducing pressure to start important and difficult discussions. It wouldn’t provide guidance for that conversation. A good thing is that there would be more pressure the more screwed up the situation is. We can expect this catalyzing mechanism to exist continuously till we either solve the problem or give up on limiting work in progress on portfolio level.

    If someone claims that Portfolio Kanban is supposed to provide more than that in terms of defining what is the right thing, well, we may be talking about different things.

  • Recipes Are (Almost) Useless

    One of the least useful pieces of advice you may ever get on management would go along the lines: “we’ve done such and such and it worked freaking miracles for us, thus you should do the same.” In fact, all the ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ are sort of a warning signal for me, whenever I learn about someone doing something right.

    This is by the way something that is surprisingly prevalent in many management books. A story of someone wildly successful who shares how they believe they achieved it. While I do appreciate a story and all the insider’s insight that help to understand a little bit more it is only a story.

    Was it backed up by credible research? Was it successfully adapted in a number of other organizations? What might be critical assumptions that we base on and how would the story be different in another context?

    It’s not that I would call each of these stories bullshit. Pretty much the opposite. I often find that many of the ideas shared are aligned with my experience. The issue is that on occasions I can track down some of the underlying prerequisites that aren’t even mentioned in the source. Does it mean lack of good will? I don’t think so. I’d rather go with fairly shallow knowledge.

    Unfortunately this has a lot to do with what we, as consumers of books, articles or conference presentations, expect. It is oh so common when the basic expectation is to get a recipe. Tell me how to build my startup. Tell me how to fix my effectiveness problem. Tell me how to grow an awesome team. Tell me how to change my organizational culture. Tell me how to scale up a method we are using.

    Yes, recipes sell well. They are sometimes dubbed “actionable content” as an opposition to theories that are non-actionable. That is unless someone undertakes effort to understand them and adjust to their own context.

    Over years I’ve been enthusiastic about some methods and practices I discovered. I’ve been skeptical about many more. I’ve changed my mind about quite a bunch of them too. An interesting realization is that the further from a plain recipe a method is the more I tend to consider it useful in the long run. I guess one of the reasons for me to stick with Kanban for all these years is that I quickly realized how adaptive the method is and how much liberty I could take using it.

    This is also a reason why I never become a fanboy of Scrum. While obviously there’s much value in specific practices it offers in specific contexts I got discouraged by early “do it by the book or you aren’t doing Scrum” attitude promoted by the community.

    I digress though. The point I want to make is pretty simple.

    Recipes are useless.

    OK, OK. Almost useless.

    It doesn’t really matter whether we discuss a project management techniques, software development practices or general management methods.

    It’s not without a reason that pretty much any approach, once it becomes popular, ends up being not nearly as useful as it was reported in early success stories. There are just too many possible contexts to have any universally sound solution.

    What’s more, during its early days, a method is typically handled by people who invest much time to understanding how and why it works. After all, there are no success stories yet, or very few of them, so a sane person handles such a thing cautiously. Then, eventually it goes downhill. Some would treat a method as universal cure for all the pains of any organization, others would sense a good certification business opportunity and suddenly any understanding of ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ is gone.

    One thing is what I believe in and how I approach the tools I adopt to my toolbox. Another one is that I frequently get asked about an advice. I guess this is inevitable when you do at least a bit of coaching and training. Anyway, in every such situation the challenge is to dodge a bullet and avoid giving a recipe as an answer. This by the way means that if I am answering your question with ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ you should kick me in the butt and ignore the answer altogether.

    A much better answer would be sharing a handful of alternatives along with all the assumptions I know that made them work in the first place. Additional points are for supporting that with relevant research or models.

    In either case the goal should be the ultimate understanding why this or that thing would work in a specific context.

    Without that a success story is just that – a story.

    Don’t get me wrong. I like stories. We are storytellers after all. It’s just that a story itself bears only that much value.

    The next time you hear a story, treat it for what it is. The next time someone offers you a recipe, treat it for what it is.

  • Why Organizational Transformations Fail

    You can’t reorganize the way a business thinks by reorganizing the business.

    ~Stephen Parry

    I can safely state that every company I worked for was attempting to make an organizational transition during my time there. Motivations varied from simply surviving, through adjusting to a new environment, to improving the whole business. Approaches to run a transition also differed, but one common part was a reorganization.

    Oh, reorganizations. Who doesn’t love reorgs? Shaking everyone around. Bringing in good old insecurity and fear of unknown. Quite an interesting strategy to introduce a positive change, although the one which is most prevalent and often inevitable. Unfortunately, a strategy that has a pretty low success rate too.

    After all, coffee doesn’t become sweeter simply because you stir it.

    The interesting part, however, is that I can come up with an example or two in which reorganizations helped to make a transition a success, or even make it possible in the first place.

    How come? The answer is hidden in Stephen Parry’s words at the beginning of the post. It’s not about the reorganization itself; it’s about changing the way business thinks. The problem with most reorgs is that they’re driven from the top, which usually means that the top of hierarchy remains the same. It also means that the way business thinks, which spreads top-down, remains unchanged.

    If the organization’s leaders’ mindset remains the same, any change that is introduced down there isn’t sustainable. Eventually, it will be reverted. Depending on how many layers of isolation there are it may take some time but it’s inevitable. Prevailing mindset just goes top-down and unless you can address its source it’s a battle you’re not going to win.

    I can think of, and have been a part of, reorganizations that shook the very top of a company, introducing new leaders and thus enabling the new way of thinking. Yes, the business was reorganized but this was neither the only nor the most important part of the change.

    Because coffee doesn’t become sweeter simply because you stir it. Unless you’ve remembered to add sugar before, that is.

    The game-changer here is mindset; that has to change in order to enable the successful transition. And I have bad news for you: it has to change at the very top of the organization. You don’t necessarily have to start there, but eventually it either happens or things, in general, remain the same.

    So if you consider a reorg as a way to change how your business works, ask yourself a question: does this change affect the mindset of the organization’s leaders? If not, I wouldn’t expect much chance of success.

    Besides, there are many ways to skin a cat. A reorg isn’t the only tool you have to change mindset across the organization. Heck, it isn’t even a very good one. Remember that when you start the next revolution just to see that virtually nothing changes as a result.

    By the way, there is a neat application of this idea in a bit different situation too. If you want to preserve mindset across the organization when changing leaders, pay very close attention how new leaders think. Your company can be a well-oiled machine, but when steering wheel is grabbed by a guy who neither understands nor cares about the existing mindset, the situation is going to deteriorate pretty quickly. You just don’t want to hire Steve Balmer to substitute for Bill Gates.

  • Local Optimizations Aren’t (Always) Evil

    A message that we hear over and over again is that we should optimize the whole and not the parts as local optimizations often (arguably always) result in making the whole operate less efficiently.

    I don’t want to bring up such stupid examples as counting lines of code (Want some? Here it goes!) or counting bugs (Whoa! On this screen there are several glitches. Why don’t I submit dozen tickets?). Listen to John Seddon’s stories for some less obvious examples.

    So let’s assume that we should focus on optimizing the whole.

    Now, tell this to this line manager who works for a couple thousand-employee organization. How the heck can this poor guy leading five people optimize the whole? Most likely he can’t. Well, of course he may, and should, fight his way up there to make his managers aware of problems he sees and help them to convince their managers, who need to get through to their managers, etc. A couple years later someone, finally, tells the CEO that she has a problem, so she makes the right decisions to optimize the whole.

    Except it doesn’t work this way. Most likely the message is ignored on one level or another. It’s actually pretty common that it doesn’t get through past the first level of a hierarchy. So we’re back to square one: our poor leader can’t optimize the whole. He neither has the visibility nor the power to do so.

    Should he fall back and sit silent?

    Hell no!

    He should make a goddamn paradise out of his tiny slice of the organization. He should optimize locally to the point where his team is the most effective team on the planet Earth.

    And yes, I am pretty much aware that many of these optimizations mean suboptimizing the whole. Actually, that’s perfect. Yup, I’ve just said it: that’s perfect. It means the guy’s manager needs to act. Set some boundaries or constraints. Point out how the manager harms the rest of the org. Otherwise the boss is just accepting the fact that the overall performance of his teams will drop. Of course he will still have this rock star team, but I guess you don’t get much praise for having a star player and, at the same time, seeing your team relegated to a lower league.

    There’s another nice side effect of the situation. These local optimizations, as long as they’re reasonable, are likely to virally spread throughout the organization. It means that the change starts affecting more than just a single team or even a division. It starts changing the whole org. For better or for worse. The role of senior managers is to funnel these changes into the right direction.

    After all, when our line manager changes the part of the organization which he can comprehend isn’t it optimizing the whole from his perspective?

    So roll up your sleeves and make your part of the company the best freaking team/division/what have you in the freaking world. Make your boss think how to set you constraints in a way that it doesn’t result in suboptimization of the whole.

  • The Project Portfolio Kanban Story: First Changes

    Those of you who remember my Kanban Story probably remember how important experimentation mindset was for me since the beginning of my journey with the method. On project portfolio level the only difference was that I was well aware that such attitude is crucial even before I started doing anything at all. In other words I planned to adopt such attitude.

    With this kind of approach you should expect changes in the process and, as a result, changes on Kanban board as well.

    OK, let’s start with what I had on the day one:

    What was wrong with it?

    Well, maybe not really wrong, but it soon appeared I needed more information from the board than I’d already had.

    First thing, which became clear and actually could have been predicted, was that throwing all future projects into a single “planned” bucket was an oversimplification. Actually a planned project was pretty much any project which wasn’t yet signed, meaning that there were still many bad things which could potentially happen before we were 100% sure we would be doing it.

    Soon enough I had two groups of planned projects: these which were still expected to be built in near future and those which were in doubt for whatever reasons. Once I realized it I just added another column to the board. Since it was very unlikely that a project “in doubt” would automatically go into development and most probably it would go back to “planned” stage before, I added the column on the very left and index cards could freely go between “planned” and “in doubt” back and forth as I was learning new facts on the projects.

    Second problem was related with general status of projects. As I needed to pay more attention to challenged projects than to these which were doing perfectly fine this information was crucial to have it at hand. I decided to go with a simple green-yellow-red statuses, meaning respectively that project was going as planned, wasn’t going as planned but changes could be absorbed by project team or agreed upon with clients or wasn’t going as planned and unless something was done we were likely to fail.

    Technically I just grabbed a bunch of color magnets and attached them to all projects in “ongoing” phase. I was changing magnets to different colors whenever a project changed its status according to above definitions. Once I clearly saw which projects are at risk, and I saw that a dozen or more times a day, I could easily ask for more information on a project, look for risk reduction actions, set a higher priority to a project or whatever I felt could help to bring it back to the right track.

    After changes the board slightly changed:

    Portfolio Kanban Board 2

    However that wasn’t all. Third issue I was facing was that I couldn’t tell looking at the board when we were expected to deliver a project. It was super-important information as without knowing the dates it was hard to say whether project was going according to the plan or not. After all without dates I could hardly say I even knew the plan. It was also very difficult to plan future projects as I couldn’t really tell when this or the other team would be free.

    And this is why my index cards started evolving as well. At the very beginning an index card for a project was very simple:

    As process described on the board wouldn’t tell me anything about dates I decided to add this information to index cards. I wrote any key dates we knew for a project. It could be stage deadlines if we had multiple stage deliveries or deadlines for delivery, user acceptance testing and project closure, etc.

    Then, as you may easily guess, these dates started changing, either in controlled or uncontrolled manner. Either way I ended up crossing out the old dates and adding new ones. Despite the fact that index cards started looking a bit cluttered I realized that the fact that dates had changed was important to me as well so decided to keep it this way.

    And then I had all the discussions on budgets. I mean one thing is to deliver on time, another one is to keep a project within budget. So yes, I was having these budget-related chats pretty regularly. Of course I could refer to budgeting application, but then I wanted to work on the data which is up to date. This disqualified the budgeting app as sometimes we had old data there. What more, there was a number of different reasons why we had it this way, be it anything from preserving initial budget estimates to bug in the system.

    Anyway, I ended up writing budgets on index cards. And again, whenever budget was changing I was crossing the old number out and adding a new one.

    A new index card looked like this:

    Besides the initial information, which was project name and team or teams working on a project, I had project status and a sort of notebook for important facts regarding the project (dates, budgets). Why do I say that it was a notebook? Well, after some time handful of index cards looked not-that-clean:

    Anyway, I had the information I needed.

    Of course all these improvements didn’t happen in a single day. It was more of a constant process of small adjustments and tweaks spread over a longer time span.

    There’s also one approach I used, which you may find useful. When I was adding dates or budgets to index notes, I didn’t checked them for each and every project which was on the board already. I just set the policy that each new index note which makes it to “ongoing” column had to have the data filled. In terms of projects which were already in development I was adding this information slowly over time, usually whenever I was discussing the very project and somehow dates or budget became important in the conversation.

    It meant that eventually I’d have had complete information either because I gradually updated all the index cards in “ongoing” column or because projects were finished and the cards were moved to “maintenance.”

    After all these evolutionary changes I was still kind of unhappy with the board. I still didn’t feel I had any explicit limits and, what even worse, I didn’t see any simple method to add them. I also noted that sometimes I found it hard to keep all the information updated, as the board was still fully owned and managed by myself. However I decided not to go with it to the outside world unless I was sure it was going to work.

    So no, that’s not the end of the story. However, I encourage you to read it from the beginning.

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  • Hand-Offs Are Bad (But Unavoidable)

    Recently many of my discussions on process optimizations come to a point where we focus on hand-offs. When I say about hand-offs I think about every situation when a work item, feature, user story, requirement, or however you call those gizmos you build, is handed from one person to another. Think a business analyst handing requirements to a developer or a developer handing updated version of an app to a quality engineer, etc.

    Now, hand-offs are bad because I say so. You have to believe me because I am a Jedi.

    OK, being serious, I can show you why it is so. Every hand-off which is incorporated in your process is a place where work can pile up, and it usually does. Lots of tasks waiting to be picked up by another team member – doesn’t it sound familiar? Basically, one of things we are trying to do whenever we’re implementing Kanban is to limit work in progress, and one of very first effects of it is limiting a number of tasks waiting in these hand-off stages.

    There is more however. Another reason why hand-offs aren’t cool at all is it means making knowledge chain longer. It means adding another link between client/user and people who actually build the thing. You are virtually asking for more of unspoken assumptions and interpretations while making it even more difficult to sort things out whenever they’re vague. You will go through all these people to get the answer for your question. Or, more likely, you will just make one more assumption which is likely to be wrong.

    Then, we have responsibility. It’s funny to look at these huge corporations adding new roles and teams to their development process. Somehow they believe that each team which is more downstream will verify what a team which is more upstream has just done. At the same time they’re dissolving responsibility for building good software, and building good software is I guess what is what they aim for. I don’t say that mentality like “I have a whole team of quality engineers so they will catch any bugs I make” is something they consciously incorporate to their process but that’s exactly what they typically get. They should really look at those small companies that are built purely from software developers. Somewhat magically they can deliver high-quality software. How come? How is it even possible without a crowd of business analysts, quality engineers, release managers and whatnot? I have a hint: they all feel damn responsible for quality as they hand their product off only once – right to their client.

    I am well aware that, most of the time, we can’t get rid of all hand-offs from our development process. I don’t even say that we have to avoid them by any means.

    I just say that we should be aware of everything that comes along with them and…

    • Limit a number of hand-offs to lowest reasonable level. Think about any shortcuts in your process that you can make without quality loss. Think about simplifying the process.
    • Avoid adding new hand-offs whenever possible. Sometimes we want, or need, or have to add another link to our chain. Sometimes we want to have a messenger between clients and users and development team. But please, don’t add more messengers that it is absolutely necessary. As a rule of thumb: the closer development is to the client/user the better.
    • Measure and control hand-off stages you already have. Learn how big piles of idle tasks there are. Limit work which is waiting for someone. Organize your process in a way which supports quick consumption of work items which hit one of hand-off stages.
    • Make hand-offs more informal. The more informal hand-off is the more smoothly it will usually go. People sitting in one room, cross-functional teams, little formalisms all help to keep hand-offs informal.

    In terms of improving team’s productivity it is really a low hanging fruit and the one that may teams don’t even think of.

    If you don’t think it is a problem in your case, perform a little experiment. Measure how much time your work items live within the process and then split it into two numbers: how much time someone is actively working on them and how much time they are waiting for someone to take care of them. Simplifying things a bit, the latter number is the price you pay for all your hand-offs. And yes, I pretty much expect that, statistically speaking idle time is way bigger than active time.

  • 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.

  • Mechanics of Kanban Improvements

    As I’ve already started working on my session for ACE Conference 2011 I tinker at different improvements introduced by Kanban and the way they pop out. Actually if I had to point a single, most surprising for me, feature of Kanban I’d point exactly the way it fosters improvements.

    When we were starting with Kanban I expected it to be more a very lightweight approach, which organizes the workflow and doesn’t get into way, than something which may trigger any improvements on its own. Things didn’t really work that way.

    Yes, we fixed issues we’d faced at that time but that was to be expected. Then we kept finding new issues and correcting them. For a longer time I didn’t really put much thought how it worked but I had to explain somehow specific practices we introduced in my presentation on AgileEE as I wanted to talk about the subject. I realized that we didn’t plan them. They just popped out. Somehow. Magic?

    No, not magic. After short investigation I found the one to blame – it was Kanban. Thanks to using Kanban, specific problems were unveiled and we were just fixing them, sometimes completely unconsciously.

    One of my favorite stories is when I suddenly realized we had collective code ownership. Yes, it was totally out of the blue. “Wait,” I thought “didn’t we discuss it through? Didn’t we end up with conclusion that we wouldn’t have collective code ownership? What the hell?” Actually it appeared that it was just easier to have collective code ownership in a pull system, such as Kanban, so people stopped thinking whether this is their own or someone else’s code. After some some time we had collective code ownership implemented basically effortlessly.

    That is exactly the mechanics of Kanban improvements. You introduce them because it’s just easier that way. You either see something is wrong on the board and have a quick discussion how to tackle the problem and implement a solution or people start dealing with the issue unconsciously. Either way you end up with your process slightly improved.

    And you repeat this activity. Multiple times. After some time when you compare what have you started with and what you ended up with you start thinking: how the hell this whole improvement thing in Kanban works? You can’t see it but somehow it’s happening. All the time.

    Well, it seems it just works that way. Don’t complain, just make use of it.

  • Implementing Change

    The other day I was asked to discuss how we can improve the way one of our software development teams works. Well, actually it was rather something like “Pawel, help us to implement Kanban” but, as it soon appeared, it wasn’t that simple.

    A typical discussion about implementing Kanban

    Me: So where do we start?

    Colleague: Um, I’m not really sure if Kanban is really for us. Convince me.

    Me: I don’t want to. If something doesn’t suit your team I’ll be the last person to convince you to implement it.

    Colleague: So where do we start?

    Me: Maybe with problems you and the team have. I guess there are some otherwise we wouldn’t be talking now.

    It isn’t about applying recipes

    The discussion changed its course. We immediately switched from discussing Kanban to talking about issues and looking for a solution which would be suitable in each and every individual case. If one of problems is people don’t want to have yet another place to do task management, and they can’t abandon either of current systems, introducing Kanban board may not be as great idea as it initially appears.

    If you start discussion with the conclusion already fixed in your head you will not only miss opportunities to improve but you also risk applying the wrong cure and making the situation worse.

    It is OK if you just don’t know

    A couple of times through the discussion I came up to the point where I had no idea what the right solution might be. And this is perfectly OK. It’s not about playing knowledgeable person. It’s about giving the good advice or not giving any advice at all.

    What more, admitting that you don’t know the answer is just a starting point for digging deeper. Each of these moments triggered some changes in our analysis. If we can’t go further here, maybe we should try there. Let’s stop talking about techniques which may or may not work and make a fast-paced Q&A session about potential issues the team may face. Or maybe let’s do mental walkthrough of processes the team covers.

    As it appeared each time we admitted that we don’t know helped us with coming up with a reasonable conclusions at the very end.

    Adjust tools for people, not the other way around

    When you know some method or approach and it works fine for you, you are always tempted to apply it in other environments too. The problem is other environment means other people. As a result your approach may not be so great anymore.

    But who said you can’t change the approach? Are methods we use some kind of dogma? Actually choosing a subset of techniques or practices from any given methodology is usually better than not using them at all. And if you choose wisely even a couple of small changes may yield significant improvements. So yes, do adjust methods before applying them.

    That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t change ever. Of course they should. But motivation to change should be intrinsic and not enforced from outside, i.e. because manager told so.

    A funny thing is that with this approach you can end with similar conclusion to the one you started with. The difference is now you are more likely to succeed as, even though you aim at the same target, you will choose different way to get there.

    And in case you were curious, yes, we eventually came back to Kanban.