I’ve been revisiting my earlier KFC Development work in light of my more recent focus on five primary practices. This blog post an brief overview of what’s changed, and what my mental model looks like now. Read it here.
Shewart:
- Chance-cause: Implies that the variation is random and is inherent to the design of the system. However this is internal variation that is controllable by modifying policy and/or changing process.
- Assignable-cause: Implies that there is an easy cause-and-effect relationship between an external event and the variation. Cannot be controlled by local management.
Alpert / Deming
- Common-cause: Implies that the variation is common to all similarly designed systems so it’s nothing special. Probabilistically predictable but otherwise noise within the system.
- Special-cause: Signals that something happened that was a surprise (i.e., new knowledge or an event that is different to how the system normally works). Unpredictable.
Feigenbaum
- Usual: The amount of variation that you’ve learned to expect of the system.
- Unusual: Any variation that is greater than what you’d expect.
I kind of like the simplicity of Feigenbaum’s naming but it’s useful to know about all the variants to have a better understanding of what they’re all trying to convey.
On April 22nd in Atlanta, the Lean Software & Systems consortium recognized significant contributions from two prominent members of the Kanban community: David Joyce, for his leadership of Kanban adoption at BBC Worldwide; and Alisson Vale for the exemplary performance of his business Phidelis and his leadership and contribution to the South American / Brazilian Agile community.
Read the official announcement
Read David Joyce’s acceptance speech
The announcement of the award came as a surprise to almost everyone in attendance at the Speaker’s Recognition Luncheon during the Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010. It was the best kept secret of the event.
The award recognizes outstanding achievement, leadership and community contribution in the field of Lean applied to software development, IT work and systems engineering.
The Lean SSC acknowledges the Agile Alliance as its inspiration. The Gordon Pask Award now in its 5th year has been shown to be a positive influence on the Agile community. In turn, it has given its winners the status of “tenured professors” within the community. The winners are able to propose unfashionable, counter-intuitive or dissenting ideas and the community will respect their opinion and pay attention. As such, the Pask Award has been a force for inclusion and diversity within the Agile community. It is intended that the Brickell Key Award will do the same for the emerging Lean software and systems community.
The Award is named for the man made island off Miami, where the Mandarin Oriental hotel is situated. The Mandarin Oriental played host to the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference where the Lean Software & Systems Consortium was formed and the community came together for the first time.
The board of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium made a unanimous decision on the selection of the first recipients of the award.
David Joyce was selected for his achievement in leading a significant adoption of Kanban across BBC Worldwide and spreading the idea virally into the BBC public broadcasting system. In his position as a development manager, David did not have positional authority to impose change on the many teams that have adopted his ideas. Instead he led by example and provided service to others to help them adopt.
As the results became evident he started to spread the word wider within the BBC and within the London and UK Agile community. He started blogging and sharing his results with a still wider audience. His work came to the attention of senior leadership and a presentation on Kanban was given to the COO of BBC Worldwide.
David has been able to show tangible business benefit for the changes and increased revenue recognition as a direct result of adopting Kanban. As such he has given the whole community a tremendous reference site that acts as a permission giver for many others within the media industry and across other business domains. Many new Kanban implementations have already happened as a result of David’s work and the association of tangible business success from Kanban adoption at such a world renowned brand name company.
Read Alisson Vale’s blog acknowledgment.
Alisson Vale was also a very obvious choice as a first recipient of the award. His work building Phidelis into a slick, high maturity, lean software product company is unsurpassed. He has set a bar to which the rest of the community aspire. His ideas on leadership, business alignment, visualization of work and management have inspired many. His presentation and paper for Lean & Kanban 2009 impressed everyone. His latest thinking on visualization tooling leads the industry, combining social media with kanban and workflow management.
Phidelis demonstrates business benefit from Kanban by actively delivering new working software to its customers several times per week. The company has used a flow-based approach to software development for over 2 years. There have been no projects at Phidelis during this time and yet hundreds of new deliveries to customers.
In addition, Alisson has been an active member of the Agile community in Brazil and has recently contributed a 10,000 word chapter on Kanban for a Portuguese language book on Agile Methods.
The Brickell Key Award prize includes a laser-engraved crystal trophy, an invitation to join the Technical Advisory Board of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium, an all expenses paid invite to Lean Software & Systems 2011 in Los Angeles, California, plus funding to attend one other international conference during the next 12 months.
The announcement of the award and the choice of winners is a tribute to the contribution of kanban systems in growing the adoption of Lean concepts in the IT industry and in the contribution of the Kanban community, through the Limited WIP Society, in making this happen. Please take the opportunity to congratulate David and Alisson and reflect on how far this community has come in less than three years since August 2007.
David J. Anderson
Vice President, Lean Software & Systems Consortium
Chair, Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010
In my forthcoming book, I’ve documented the 5 core properties that I see as consistent on teams using the Kanban approach to process evolution and change management. These properties are…
1. Visualize Workflow
2. Limit work-in-progress
3. Measure & Manage Flow
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
5. Use Models to Recognize Improvement Opportunities
These properties represent facets of an organizational process that have been present on all Kanban implementations that I’ve been involved with. They are written in a rough order of focus or implementation. So all 5 properties may not be present initially but over time they should appear providing the leadership/management is dedicated to successful evolutionary approach to change using Kanban.
Visualize Workflow is subtle. It is beyond visualization of work – the concept I pushed hard with my Agile Management book. Visualizing workflow is about revealing the mechanism, the interactions, the handoffs, the queues, buffers, waiting and delays that are involved in the production of a piece of valuable software.
Limit work-in-progress implies the introduction of a pull system from a family of possible solutions: CONWIP, DBR, CapWIP, Kanban.
Measure & Manage Flow highlights a focus on keeping work moving and using the need for flow as the driver for improvement. A focus on flow rather than on waste removal is in my opinion a higher mastery of Lean and much less likely to lead to “Lean and Mean” anti-patterns and dysfunction.
Make process policies explicit is another level of visualization. It’s about holding up a mirror to the working reality and encouraging the whole team and its leadership to reflect on its effectiveness. Thinking of a process as a set of policies rather than a workflow is a very powerful technique.
Use models to recognize improvement opportunities shows that Kanban is quantitative and takes a scientific approach to improvements. The three models I focus on in the book and in most of my teaching are: The Theory of Constraints; an Understanding of Variation and the System of Profound Knowledge; and the Lean models of Waste and Flow, though I teach waste as economic costs rather than the manufacturing-centric approach that is typical.
In my next blog I’ll discuss the properties that didn’t make the cut and why not!
The next London Limited WIP Society meeting will be Thursday April 8, starting at 18:30. Please register at http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-scrum/john-stevenson-kanban-for-just-in-time-training
The topic is “Kanban for Just In Time Training” given by John Stevenson.
It is not uncommon in IT projects that you are required to learn something on the fly or you see an opportunity to introduce a new technique or tool that would bring great benefits to a project.
How do you manage the learning curve required for something new without major impact to the project?
This talk will discuss how Kanban can be used to manage a training schedule, for either personal development or for team skills transfer.
Arranging the board so that the studying is planned and managed effectively
Discussing how to use of work in progress limits to manage the training schedule to ensure that learning is done effectively and avoiding study overload.
Using card design to ensure that the goals and measurement of training success are defined, so that the effectiveness of the training can be assessed.
Organising cards to enable a flexible training schedule and study topics can be picked up “Just In Time”
Adding the pomedaro technique to maximise your study time.
The next London Limited WIP Society meeting will be Thursday March 11, starting at 18:30. Please register at http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-scrum/chris-pitts-migrating-from-scrum-to-scrumban/zx-548
The topic is “Migrating from Scrum to Scrumban – an Experience Report from a Kanban Virgin” given by Chris Pitts.
Last year one of my client teams was looking for a better way to work following some problems while running fairly standard Scrum. One change appeared to be to combine Scrum with kanban – “Scrumban”. So we jointly decided to give it a go.
This experience report explains how the team did it. It should help anyone interested in evolving their Scrum and other timeboxed iterative process to an interesting alternative. The talk will cover:
- Why evolve? A summary of how the team was working and the issues they were seeing.
- Practical observations of how using kanban changes timeboxed iterative develop process
- Some of the questions that you will need to address when you change
- Some concrete solutions to those questions Where next? Possible directions for further evolution.
Cumulative Flow diagram is a very good starting point for stop-the-line or retrospective meeting. Here is a real example from TargetProcess development.
Links to all abstracts are now available via the Conference page. Under the headings of Keynote, Track Chairs, Invited Speakers and Accepted Papers you will find the names and titles of the presentation link to the abstract and a short bio for the speaker. The conference schedule details are currently being finalized. We will announce where to find them as soon as they are available.
The first Lean Software & Systems Conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA between April 21st and 23rd 2010.
Following on from his description of the Kanban implementation at Lonely Planet, Bruce Taylor has now made a related presentation available – Little Bits of Cardboard.
Simple yet effective technique to discover wait and waste in your development flow. All you need to do is to visualize a complete flow of a single user story.